Come help us celebrate four new books by local poets. We'll also have a brief Q & A so you can ask questions about writing and publishing.
Watershed Reading Series Celebrates New Books
Timothy Yu is the author of 100 Chinese Silences, the editor’s selection in the Les Figues Press NOS Book Contest, and of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford), winner of the Book Award in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. He is also the author of three chapbooks: 15 Chinese Silences (Tinfish), Journey to the West (Barrow Street; winner of the Vincent Chin Chapbook Prize from Kundiman), and, with Kristy Odelius, Kiss the Stranger (Corollary), and the editor of Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets (Kelsey Street). He is professor of English and Asian American studies and director of the Asian American Studies Program at UW-Madison.
J.L. Conrad is the author of the full-length poetry collections A World in Which (Terrapin Books) and A Cartography of Birds (Louisiana State University Press), as well as the chapbooks Recovery (winner of the 2022 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize, Texas Review Press) and Not If But When (winner of the third annual Dead Lake Chapbook Contest, Salt Hill). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Sugar House Review, Salamander, Jellyfish, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
jeanie tomasko n. [g-knee tuh-mah-sco, origin: midwest] : as in person, place or thing born and residing in Wisconsin a: lover of autumn, dictionaries, lowercases, suitcases and horsing around b: prone to brake for herons, coffee, novelty machines filled with shiny (M)adonnas, long periods of silence c: makes a mean guacamole and occasionally enjoys dusting d: married to steve tomasko who is responsible for all of the info at : jeanietomasko.com
About Steve Tomasko’s new chapbook And No Spiders Were Harmed, Sean Thomas Dougherty had this to say: “In these phenomenal poems I was struck by the seemingly matter of fact Frank O’Hara-like discursiveness of Tomasko’s voice, his ability to simply meander conversationally about snow and metaphor, about sloths and love, spiders and 2 or 3 AM. And then the turn, “this punch-to-the-gut / feeling, this I-really-am / mortal,” musical as “the dock, warped, weathered, worn / smooth from years of sun and water.” For what seems so simple an aesthetic is actually deceptively complex. Tomasko’s eye is a keen notice of the minutiae of the natural and living world, both human and elemental that surround us. These are 21st century poems that build on the aesthetics of such 20th century innovators as the NY School of Poetry, with their discursive conversational tone, being produced up there, now, in rural Wisconsin. And imagined in places far across this world.”
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