Rivka Clifton with Cass Garison, Austin Price, and Miriam Milena

Third Place Books is elated to welcome Rivka Clifton, Cass Garison, Austin Price, and Miriam Milena to our Ravenna store! They'll be celebrating the release of Clifton's debut poetry collection, , and reading from selected work. The poems in Muzzle contemplate the relationship between speech and violence and how translating the experience of grief and loss into language can itself be a form of violence-through one's initial experience and living memory. As we traverse the poems in this collection, we are invited to consider our own lives, our own relationship with memory, grief, loss, love, and, yes, violence.This event is free and open to the public.

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In her debut full collection of poetry, Rivka Clifton, a curator of curiosities, challenges us to consider language as a form of violence. Challenges us to understand what violence can be: memory, both lived and re-lived. Rivka draws on her personal journey with these powerful landscapes, which are part incantation, part exorcism. The poems in Muzzle contemplate the relationship between speech and violence and how translating the experience of grief and loss into language can itself be a form of violence-through one's initial experience and living memory. How can everyday speech be violent, how can small violences be a means of communication-these are the questions posed to us by Muzzle. As we traverse the poems in this collection, we are invited to consider our own lives, our own relationship with memory, grief, loss, love, and, yes, violence.

Rivka Clifton is the author of the chapbooks MOT and AGAPE (Osmanthus Press). Her work appears in Pleiades, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Colorado Review, The Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. She is an avid record collector and curator of curiosities.

Cass Garison is a poet & artist with an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle. Their first chapbook, "Beauty Exasperated," is available through Common Meter Press. They were a 2023-2024 Hugo House Fellow and have work published at Poets.org, in Gulf Coast, Shō Poetry Journal, Washington Square Review, Foglifter, & others. Cass hosts an annual retreat for poets and artists working in all mediums. They also organize Threshold, a fledgling hybridized trans- & queer-centered poetic-performance art series in Seattle. More about them at CassGarison.com.

Miriam Milena is a writer based in Bellingham. She is a current MFA student in Creative Writing at Western Washington University. Her work has appeared in the Bellingham Review and Cola Literary Review. She has received fellowships and support from Brooklyn Poets and the Mineral School.

Austin Price is a cultural critic and journalist whose interviews, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Comics Journal, Pop Matters and The Hopkins Review. In collaboration with artist Matthew Rainwater he is the writer of the comics Garage Raja and Batmonster and alongside composer Costas Dafnis he is the writer of the musical Rush to Die. He is currently at work on his first novel.

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

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