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White Wale is looking forward to virtually hosting poet Matthew Olzmann to celebrate his third collection, Constellation Route (Alice James Books), called "intimate and affecting" by Publishers Weekly. He'll be joined by poets Lucia LoTempio and Shara McCallum.
Head to this event’s page on our website to order these writers’ books! Check out our website, where you can search our whole inventory or order any books we don’t have in stock, and don’t miss our lists of recommended and best-selling titles.
This event will be hosted on Zoom. You'll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 1/21. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.
About Constellation Route:
"I would like to lease a plot of land in Matthew Olzmann's imagination. I would like especially to shelter-in-place inside his newest collection, Constellation Route. Each poem is, symbolically, a star—and also, often, a letter, elegy, and ode. Some of my favorite words appear in this book—salamander, psychopomp, incinerate, quibble, foist, satchel, and caterwaul among them. Between these covers you'll find a Wonderland of inventive language, profound image-making, and a missive to every reader of much-needed, radical joy." —Julie Marie Wade
“Matthew Olzmann has long been a poet of exceptional wisdom and his latest collection is revelatory. Each poem reaches beyond the interior landscape to address the other in timely and intimate dialogues that bend, reframe, surprise, and ultimately embrace. Deeply perceptive, this series of epistolary poems are offerings to a new age in need of understanding where we are going, where we have been, and more importantly, what do we do for each other once we’ve reached our destination.” —Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth
“In Constellation Route, Matthew Olzmann’s sublimely playful imagination figures the poet as part Hermes, a conductor of dreams and messages; part Charon, guide to the underworld; and part United States Postal worker. It’s a funny word, ‘correspondence,’ one that Olzmann explores—its etymological routes—to reveal a cosmos of exchanges that delivers absurdity as easily as it delivers the comfort of our familiars. Olzmann makes these appointed rounds with humor, awe, and grace.” —Gregory Pardlo
About the poets:
Matthew Olzmann is the author of three collections of poems from Alice James Books: Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, Contradictions in the Design, and Constellation Route. His writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity and elsewhere. He’s been awarded fellowships from the Kresge Arts Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony. Currently, he teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Lucia LoTempio is the author of Hot with the Bad Things (Alice James Books, 2020). You can find her work in West Branch, BOAAT, Verse, The Journal, TYPO, as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, and elsewhere. With Suzannah Russ Spaar, she co-authored the chapbook Undone in Scarlet (Tammy, 2019). Lucia lives and writes in Minneapolis.
From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US & UK, including No Ruined Stone (2021). McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room, an anthology of poems selected from across her six books and translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández was published in 2021 by Mantis Editores in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch and have been set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz. Awards for her work include the Silver Musgrave Medal, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize (for her previous book, Madwoman), a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (for her first book, The Water Between Us). McCallum delivers readings, lectures, and workshops at universities and literary festivals in the US and internationally and has taught creative writing and literature at various universities. She is on the faculty of the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. McCallum was appointed the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate. During her tenure as Laureate, McCallum is delivering readings & events throughout Pennsylvania & elsewhere in the US & internationally, in person and virtually, and is hosting the weekly radio show “Poetry Moment” on NPR affiliate station WPSU.