Join Deep Vellum Books for a reading and conversation with Julia Guez, LiAundra Grace, and Hannah Matheson in celebration of Guez’s new poetry collection, The Certain Body (Four Way Books).
About the book
In the long limbo of post-viral syndrome, Julia Guez aptly frames the recursive paralysis of pandemic rhetoric, whose seeming transitions always arrive at the same uncertainty: “and then what / and then / what, what / then.” The Certain Body captures life with illness—how the body moves through disease and rests in the liminal space of otherness. Following the speaker through a harrowing and disorienting SARS-Cov-2 infection, readers witness the poet’s gradual refortification as Guez traverses all facets of sickness: its mercies, its pleasures, its gratitudes, its reliefs, its gorgeousnesses. Probing, sharp poems centering an awareness of human ephemerality answer the words of Viktor Shklovsky: “And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” In “If Indeed I Am Ill,” Guez writes, “These sonatas, these scores, tell me / what of them will last when everything falls away—” Through these lyric expressions, Guez shows us not just how art can heal but how healing is art, a modality of acceptance, the meaning in the process, a mosaic of imperfections that creates and embraces what is.
About the Presenters
LiAundra Grace is a poet, writer, and teacher. Her work has appeared in the recent anthology, A Fire to Light Our Tongues: Texas Writers on Spirituality, Toe Good Poetry’s online journal and in the 2008 Inprint Houston Poetry Compilation. Recently, she completed her first collection of poems which centers around faith, loss, and discovery. LiAundra received her MFA from Columbia University and is a Cave Canem Fellow. Currently, she resides in Houston, Texas with her family and teaches English at Lone Star College. (Photo cred: Tiffanee Love)
Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in the city of New York. Her essays, interviews, fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in Guernica, POETRY, The Guardian, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, and Kenyon Review. She has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation as well as a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. For the last decade, Guez has worked with Teach For America New York; she’s currently the senior managing director of design and implementation. She teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers. You can find more of her work online at www.juliaguez.net. (Photo cred: Wesley Mann)
Hannah Matheson received her MFA in poetry at New York University, where she served as poetry editor of Washington Square Review. Previously awarded scholarships to attend The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, Hannah has writing in Four Way Review, The Adroit Journal, Pigeon Pages, Solar, Image Journal, Honey Lit, Best New Poets, HAD, and elsewhere. Hannah currently works as Senior Editor at Four Way Books.