Sylvia Jones: "Dope Calisthenics" & Jane Lewty: "Vespers"
About this Event
About Dope Calisthenics:
Sylvia Jones's sophomore collection examines the pressure exerted on working-class Black life by spectacle, debt, inheritance, and the market's endless demand for performance. The poems move through Baltimore, television, retail language, protest remnants, and borrowed speech, tracking how public feeling hardens into product and how survival becomes a style others learn to consume. Class aspiration and class entrapment, the theater of mobility, and the material afterlife of slogans once the moment of display has passed all loom large as Jones asks what kind of consciousness repetition makes, and what remains when the shift ends and the bill arrives? Dope Calisthenics is a book about the psychic drills required to live inside scarcity while being told to call it possibility instead.
About Vespers:
Often called “evening prayer,” vespers is held around sunset. Its purpose: to give thanks for the day and offer a sacrifice of praise to God. In Jane Lewty’s Vespers, she superimposes the tropes of the Christian ritual onto a very different type of sacrifice—that of making art. Through nightly devotion, the speaker of these poems maps ritual until it degrades: the speaker as an obedient robot, a scribe-concubine, a centaur wearing skates, a poet seeking virtuosity and dexterity. Vespers asks: What if writing prompts are a bad idea? What if one could become addicted to the incremental process? Is it possible to walk away from an addiction without suffering and trauma?
About the Poets:
Sylvia Jones is the author of Television Fathers (Meekling Press, 2024) and Dope Calisthenics, forthcoming from Relegation Books in Fall 2026. Her poems have appeared in Annulet, DIAGRAM, Smartish Pace, Shenandoah, Common Place Poetics, Long News: Poetry & Poetics, The American Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at George Washington University and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Read "Government Shutdown Day 15" and four other poems.
Jane Lewty is the author of three poetry collections: Vespers (Iowa University Press, 2026), Bravura Cool (1913 Press), and In One Form To Find Another (Cleveland State University Poetry Center). She lives in Baltimore and teaches at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
Read "an eros" and "cloister."
About the Program:
- Doors will open to registered attendees at 2:00 pm.
- A local bookseller will be on-site and have books available for purchase.
- Free parking vouchers are available to program attendees who park at the Franklin Street Garage (15 W. Franklin Street). Ask Pratt event staff for your parking voucher prior to or after the program.
- There is no registration required for virtual attendance. Simply visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library's Facebook or YouTube page.
- This is a seated event with spaces reserved for individuals with accessibility needs. ASL interpretation will also be available for attendees throughout the event. If you need additional accommodations to successfully participate, please let us know at [email protected] or 443-768-0762.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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