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

Look
by Solmaz Sharif
Sunday, November 11, 2018, 3pm.

From the publisher:
Solmaz Sharif’s astonishing first book, Look, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable losses of human lives and also the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.

At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”

Visit SubText Books to buy a copy at a discount!