Poetry Panel! Three poets read and discuss their work!

Join us on May 9th from 6-7pm for a poetry reading and discussion at Symposium Books! We're hosting Matt Donovan, Nathan McClain, and Iain Haley Pollock in discussion. They will be discussing their work and approaches to poetry. Signed copies of their books will be available for purchase.

About Matt Donovan's We Are Not Where We Are:

Since its publication in 1854, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden has ensnared the American imagination. In We Are Not Where We Are, poets Matt Donovan and Jenny George perform a chapter-by-chapter erasure of Walden, challenging its deeply flawed beliefs about individualism, the natural world, and relationships between people and the land. The resultant poems embody Donovan and George’s collaborative spirit, unearthing in Thoreau’s text a pluralistic vision of limitless possibility and wild beauty.

From the authors:

“I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond,” Thoreau writes in the opening of Walden, a book that is undeniably central to the American literary canon, as well as deeply flawed in its beliefs about individualism, the natural world, and forms of relation between people. If Thoreau’s engagement with nature and experiment in solitude might afford opportunities for self-reflection about our current ecological disasters and technological addictions, for example, it’s also well-worth interrogating his relentlessly patriarchal language, assumptions around land and belonging, and habitual surges of racism. As an act of collaborative intervention, We Are Not Where We Are was inspired both by the ways in which Walden continues to ensnare the American imagination, as well as its inherently problematic nature as a text.

Our rules for creating these erasures were simple. The central chapters of Walden were divided equally between us and follow the order of the original text. All removed words and passages are indicated by a uniform length of blank space, and we didn’t change any of Thoreau’s original language or the order of his words on the page. Rather than create a blackout poem from the book’s long introductory chapter “Economy,” we instead appropriated passages from that section for the titles of our pie

About Nathan McClain's Previously Owned:

In his daring sophomore collection, Nathan McClain interrogates his speaker’s American heritage, history, and responsibility. Investigating myth, popular culture, governance and more, Previously Owned connects a villanelle cataloging Sisyphus’s circular workflow to a Die Hard persona poem critiquing police brutality and joins complex pastorals to the stunning sequence entitled “They said I was an alternate,” which recounts the author’s experience serving on jury duty. Though McClain’s muscular lyric explores a wide range of topics, the intensity of his attention and the profundity of his care remain constant — the final page describes a young girl in a diner, ringing the bell at the host stand, “just to hear it sing, the same / song, the only song // it knows.” Insofar as this collection scrutinizes one’s own culpability and responsibility in this country, interested in the natural world and beauty, as well as what beauty distracts us from, it does so in the hopes of reimagining inheritance, of leaving our children a different song.

About Iain Haley Pollock's All the Possible Bodies:

Steeped in the myths we spin about self, family, and nation, the poems of All the Possible Bodies attend to the complexities of violence in America, racial justice, and the intersection of personal and national identity.

Pollock’s third collection is an emotionally candid and intimate portrait of our varied identities as Americans: the ways we treat one another, the value we assign to each others’ lives, and the persistent internal conflict that tugs between our desires and greater duty. 

With clarity of storytelling, musicality of lyric, and crispness of language and image, All the Possible Bodies asks: How do we make peace with our hypocrisy and complicity in a social order that harms us all? Can and should we? Singular in its telling and universal in feeling, All the Possible Bodies seeks to answer these questions through its examination of the complicated emotional and spiritual states characteristic of contemporary American life.

About the poets:

Matt Donovan is the author of five books including, most recently, the chapbook We Are Not Where We Are (Bull City Press, 2025) which was co-authored with Jenny George, and The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA 2022). He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan serves as the director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

Nathan McClain is the author of Previously Owned (2022) and Scale (2017), both from Four Way Books. His poems and prose have recently appeared in the New England Review, The Hopkins Review, The Common, and Poetry Northwest. He serves as poetry editor for the Massachusetts Review.

Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, most recently All the Possible Bodies, published by Alice James Books in 2025. Individual poems have appeared in a variety of publications, such as American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times Magazine, and The Progressive. Organizations including the Cave Canem Foundation, the NAACP, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America have recognized Pollock’s work with awards and grants. He directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, NY.

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