POETRY TALKS BACK | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation

In Mycocosmic, Lesley Wheeler’s incantatory poems summon transformation after loss—and also illuminate the underground fungal networks that help trees and other living beings talk to each other. We’re all in this together, and poetry is an art of connection that can help us feel and understand what that means. Lesley Wheeler, Natasha Sajé, and Sylvia Jones will read poems full of outreach, dialogue, and backtalk, then discuss poetry as conversation. Audience participation is welcome. 

‘People radiate light they cannot see,’ writes Lesley Wheeler in Mycocosmic, a brilliantly structured book that glimmers with tensions and betrayals, that blazes with gratitude and resilience. Wheeler’s language is alive on the page; it pulses with a perceptiveness that braids thought and sensation into imagery that startles, shines. The footnote-poem is striking—a lyrical summoning that enriches and complicates. Mycocosmic is a marvelous book that demands and rewards multiple readings.—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

Copies of Wheeler’s Mycocosmic will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Wheeler will be signing following the program.

This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 5:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of MYCOCOSMIC will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will not be livestreamed. 

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, Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, is the author of , runner-up for the Dorset Prize and her sixth poetry collection. Her other books include the hybrid memoir and the novel; previous poetry books include and, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. Wheeler’s work has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Workshop, and the Sewanee Writers Workshop. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, Guernica, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

Natasha Sajé is the author of five books of poems: The Future Will Call You Something Else (Tupelo, 2023); Vivarium (Tupelo, 2014); Bend (Tupelo, 2004); Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994); and Special Delivery (Diode Editions chapbook, 2021). Her prose books are a postmodern poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (Michigan, 2014) and a memoir-in-essays, Terroir: Love, Out of Place (Trinity, 2020). Honors include the Bannister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College; the Robert Winner and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards from the Poetry Society of America; a Pushcart prize; the 2002 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize; a Fulbright Scholarship to Slovenia; a Camargo Fellowship in France; Lambda, IPPY, Foreword, and Pen Finalist prizes. Sajé is professor emerita of English at Westminster University in Salt Lake City, and has been teaching in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program since 1996. www.natashasaje.com

Sylvia Jones a writer, editor, and Pr*son abolitionist. Sylvia Jones earned her M.F.A. from American University in Washington D.C. She lives and writes in Baltimore, MD. Her debut collection, Television Fathers, was released last year in the Fall, from Meekling Press, based in Chicago. Sylvia currently serves as an editor at Black Lawrence Press and a reader for Ploughshares. Last year, on behalf of the Goucher Pr*son Education Partnership she led a summer intro to poetry workshop in Jessup, MD. She has received fellowship and support from the Peaked Hill Trust; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Walters Museum, Topical Cream; Jack Straw Cultural Center; The Emerging Artist Initiative; OUTWrite DC; Poets at the End of The World Collective; Literary Cleveland; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Bucknell University, where she was a 2021-22 Stadler Fellow. Her writing appears in R&R Journal, Smartish Pace, Sprung Formal, , , , , , , and .

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