SubText Books Poetry Book Club

The second Sunday of every month at 3pm.

Poetry Book Club is an opportunity to join other readers in discussion of a book of poetry with no pressure to like or “understand” every book or poem. Simply read the book and come to the discussion with an open, generous, and curious mind. We’ll have a conversation about the overall themes, the poems we’re drawn to, how the poet is using the tools of poetry to communicate, and any other ideas and questions the poems generate. Books can be purchased from SubText Books at a discount in the month leading up to the meeting.

Discussions led by poet and critic Timothy Otte.

Click here for an archive of past books we've discussed.

SubText Books
6 Fifth Street West, St. Paul MN 55102

Next Up

Magical Negro
by Morgan Parker
Sunday, June 9, 2019, 3pm.

From the publisher:

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics―of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present―timeless black melancholies and triumphs.

Visit SubText Books to buy a copy at a discount!