Enjoy recent author events, interviews, and bookseller series. Visit our website to learn more: www.skylightbooks.com
Episodes
Thursday Mar 05, 2020
A Tribute to Holly Prado
Thursday Mar 05, 2020
Thursday Mar 05, 2020
"The last time I saw Holly Prado, whom I’d known forty years, we were part of a group performance of Song of Myself at Beyond Baroque. Now we have her experiment in the long poem, Weather, a single, book-length poem in the larger tradition of Whitman’s personal epic, presenting the account of a voyage, lasting from fall 2015 to fall of 2018, through the inner seasons of a mythically conscious woman’s Los Angeles.
"In a more specific tradition, Prado’s work is in the line of Diane Wakoski, Anais Nin, Diane DiPrima, Lyn Hejenian, and other women who have written with wisdom and courage about their resonantly three-dimensional inner lives. Sadly, it is her last book; but a near-compensation is, it is her best. Farthest and deepest in reach, a modernist collage orchestrated by a expressive hand, the poem is open enough to be entered virtually anywhere, yet organically shaped by a mature mythic awareness to have narrative momentum and coherence. Beautifully turned phrases, sentences, and lines abound. An example: "Out in the huge autumn sky, / leonid meteors give us their message: Don’t think too much / of your human pursuits. Don’t think you won’t be / dissolved in everything wilder than you. Enter / your myths with your open-palmed hands on your knees."
“Dissolved in everything wilder than you” — that is the state of feeling and vision Prado’s imagination makes available to us. It is also the promise all real poetry makes: that our veil of pursuits be lifted, that we see the wild truth."
—James Cushing, joined in conversation and readings by Harry E. Northup and Phoebe MacAdams.
Monday Mar 02, 2020
Michael Lee, "THE ONLY WORLDS WE KNOW" and Morgan Parker "MAGICAL NEGRO"
Monday Mar 02, 2020
Monday Mar 02, 2020
Join poets Morgan Parker (Magical Negro) and Michael Lee (The Only Worlds We Know) as they read from their respective collections.
Monday Jan 27, 2020
André Naffis-Sahely and Fred D'Aguiar, "A STRANGER"
Monday Jan 27, 2020
Monday Jan 27, 2020
Exile lies at the root of our earliest stories. Charting varied experiences of people forced to leave their homes from the ancient world to the present day, The Heart of a Stranger is an anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that journeys through six continents, with over a hundred contributors drawn from twenty-four languages.
Highlights include the wisdom of the 5th century Desert Fathers and Mothers, The Flight of the Irish Earls, Madame de Staël’s thoughts on Napoleon’s tyranny, Emma Goldman’s travails in the wake of the First Red Scare, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s tales of European colonial settlers in Kenya and the work of the contemporary Eritrean poet Ribka Sibhatu.
Edited by poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely, The Heart of a Stranger offers a uniquely varied look at a theme both ancient and urgently contemporary.
Naffis-Sahely is in conversation with Fred D'Aguiar, poet, novelist, playwright, born in London of Guyanese parents and raised in Guyana.
Tuesday Nov 19, 2019
Franny Howe, "LOVE AND I" w/ Martha Ronk
Tuesday Nov 19, 2019
Tuesday Nov 19, 2019
Set in transit even as they investigate the transitory, the cinematic poems in Love and I move like a handheld camera through the eternal, the minds of passengers, and the landscapes of Ireland and America. From this slight remove, Fanny Howe explores the edge of “pure seeing” and the worldly griefs she encounters there, cast in an otherworldly light. These poems layer pasture and tarmac, the skies above where airline passengers are compressed with their thoughts, and the ground where miseries accumulate, alongside comedies, in the figures of children in a park.
Love can do little but walk with the person and suddenly vanish, and that recurrent abandonment makes it necessary for these poems to find a balance between seeing and believing. For Howe, that balance is found in the Word, spoken in language, in music, in and on the wind, as invisible and continuous lyric thinking heard by the thinker alone. These are poems animated by belief and unbelief. Love and I fulfills Howe's philosophy of Bewilderment.
Howe is in conversation with Martha Ronk, author of 11 books of poetry and one book of short stories, Glass Grapes.
Thursday Nov 14, 2019
THE SCIENCE OF POETRY: A READING
Thursday Nov 14, 2019
Thursday Nov 14, 2019
Six poets will read work that engages with scientific disciplines such as physics, mathematics, biology, and ecology. These readings will Involve the audience in a discussion of the embodied, material consequences of experimental engagements for both scientists and poets.
Thursday Oct 31, 2019
Hanif Abdurraqib, "A FORTUNE FOR YOUR DISASTER"
Thursday Oct 31, 2019
Thursday Oct 31, 2019
In A Fortune For Your Disaster, his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It’s a book about a mother’s death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author’s black friends wanted to listen to “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It’s about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor’s dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.
Tuesday Oct 22, 2019
Nick Flynn, "I WILL DESTROY YOU" w/ Kai Carlson-Wee
Tuesday Oct 22, 2019
Tuesday Oct 22, 2019
Beginning with a poem called “Confessional” and ending with a poem titled “Saint Augustine,” Nick Flynn interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform. But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. “Begin by descending,” Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.
Flynn is in conversation with Kai Carlson-Wee, author of Rail.
Thursday Oct 17, 2019
Fariha Róisín, "HOW TO CURE A GHOST" w/ Fatimah Asghar
Thursday Oct 17, 2019
Thursday Oct 17, 2019
A poetry compilation recounting a woman’s journey from self-loathing to self-acceptance, confusion to clarity, and bitterness to forgiveness
Following in the footsteps of such category killers as Milk and Honey and Whiskey Words & a Shovel I, Fariha Róisín’s poetry book is a collection of her thoughts as a young, queer, Muslim femme navigating the difficulties of her intersectionality. Simultaneously, this compilation unpacks the contentious relationship that exists between Róisín and her mother, her platonic and romantic heartbreaks, and the cognitive dissonance felt as a result of being so divided among her broad spectrum of identities.
Róisín is in conversation with Fatimah Asghar, creator of the Emmy-nominated Web series Brown Girls.
Tuesday Sep 24, 2019
Yesika Salgado, "HERMOSA"
Tuesday Sep 24, 2019
Tuesday Sep 24, 2019
Hermosa is the path to becoming one's own home. A thread pulled when Yesika Salgado thinks about who she is and who she has been. Beyond the survival, grief, and fight, Hermosa lives in the small moments hidden beneath it all. A journey of firsts, of mistakes, of celebrations, of the love, the crush, the disaster, the rebuilding, and the never-ending cycle of growth.
Thursday Sep 19, 2019
Elizabeth Cantwell, "ALL THE EMERGENCY-TYPE STRUCTURES"
Thursday Sep 19, 2019
Thursday Sep 19, 2019
Elizabeth Cantwell's poems navigate both cultural anxieties—climate change, American consumerism, technological creep—and personal anxieties—motherhood, apocalyptic thinking, suburban complacency. What does it mean to face a future in which building emergency-type structures may be necessary for our survival, and what materials can we use to insulate those structures?
All the Emergency-Type Structures guides readers through a lyrical and incisive examination of a potential way to navigate scientifically-predicted apocalyptic visions, the destructive beauty of family, and the dense forests of our collective cultural uncertainties as we attempt to create spaces that feel like home amid rising seas, private space expeditions to Mars, births, breakups, terrifying dreams, and mass extinction events.
Wednesday Sep 18, 2019
John James, "THE MILK HOURS" w/ Jos Charles and Jordan Nakamura
Wednesday Sep 18, 2019
Wednesday Sep 18, 2019
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss.
"We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery." So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, which never stray far from an engagement with science, geography, art, and aesthetics, nor from the dream logic that motivates their incessant investigations.
Indeed, while John James begins with the biographical--the haunting loss of a father in childhood, the exhausted hours of early fatherhood--the questions that emerge from his poetic synthesis are both timely and universal: what is it to be human in an era where nature and culture have fused? To live in a time of political and environmental upheaval, of both personal and public loss? How do we make meaning, and to whom--or what--do we turn, when such boundaries so radically collapse?
James is in conversation with Jos Charles, author of feeld, and Jordan Nakamura, a poet and MFA candidate at Antioch University LA.
Tuesday Jul 30, 2019
Evening of Poetry with Red Hen Press
Tuesday Jul 30, 2019
Tuesday Jul 30, 2019
Join Red Hen Press for an evening of poetry readings, featuring Eloise Klein Healy, Ron Koertge, Kim Dower, and Francesca Bell.
Tuesday Jul 02, 2019
Ariana Reines, "A SAND BOOK"
Tuesday Jul 02, 2019
Tuesday Jul 02, 2019
Deadpan, epic, and searingly charismatic, A Sand Book is at once relatable and out-of-this-world. In poems tracking climate change, bystanderism, state murder, sexual trauma, shopping, ghosting, love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, A Sand Book chronicles new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times. What does the destruction of our soil have to do with the weather in the human soul? From sand in the gizzards of birds to the iridescence on the surface of spilt oil, from sand storms on Mars to our internet-addicted present, from the desertifying mountains of Haiti to Sandy Hook to Hurricane Sandy to Sandra Bland, A Sand Book is both a travelogue and a book of mourning. In her long-anticipated follow-up to Mercury, Ariana Reines has written her most ambitious, visceral, and satisfying work to date.
Monday Jun 17, 2019
Jacqueline Suskin, "THE EDGE OF THE CONTINENT"
Monday Jun 17, 2019
Monday Jun 17, 2019
The Edge of The Continent: The City is about California. Specifically, this volume is about Southern California, the heavily populated part of the state, the sprawling metropolis, and the thirsty land that supports so many people. Jacqueline Suskin moved to Los Angeles in 2013 and still calls the city home.
This book explores her transition into city life after leaving the majesty of Northern California forests and the fulfillment of communal off-the-grid living. In this collection, we move through the struggle of finding beauty, purpose, and joy in urbanity, and in doing so discover the infinite inspiration that exists in a place as unique as Los Angeles.
Wednesday May 01, 2019
Kenji C. Liu and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes
Wednesday May 01, 2019
Wednesday May 01, 2019
Using an invented poetry method called frankenpo (frankenstein poetry), Kenji C. Liu takes existing texts and remixes them, creating multi-faceted poems that investigate the relationship between toxic masculinity and forms of violence plaguing our modern society. In Monsters I Have Been, Liu also explores the male-male erotic and marginalized masculinities that are urgently needed as a counterweight to today’s dominant hypermasculinity. By challenging perceived gender norms with his playful, yet poignant, new form, the reader is directed toward a wider, more inclusive definition ofwhat it means to be a "man."
Winner of the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival.
The driving forces behind Rhodes’s work include a decolonizing ethos; a queer sensibility that extends beyond sexual and gender identities to include a politics of deviance; errantry; ramshackled bodies; and forms of loving and living that persist in their wild difference. Invoking individual and collective ghosts inherited across diverse geographies, this collection queers the space between past, present, and future. In these poems, haunting is a kind of memory weaving that can bestow a freedom from the attenuations of the so-called American dream, which, according to Rhodes, is a nightmare of assimilation, conquest, and genocide. How love unfolds is also a Big Bang emergence into life—a way to, again and again, cut the future open, open up the opening, undertake it, begin.
These poems are written for immigrants, queer and transgender people of color, women, Latin Americans, diasporic communities, and the many impacted by war.