S A L O N – LONDON presents Laynie Browne in conversation with Andrea Brady, March 13 2018

Tuesday March 13 2018, 7pm-9pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

Laynie Browne in conversation with Andrea Brady

Laynie will be reading from three works:

Periodic Companions is a novel with characters based on the periodic table of elements. Relationships are based upon chemistry, and characters investigate poetics, contemplative practices, and outsider culture. Overwhelmed with the futility of institutional structures, and impelled to act in response to tragic acts of violence, the elemental characters create a collective action based upon chemical signalling using human tears, in the hopes of inventing a new context for non-violent protest.

You Envelop Me. A book length poetic elegy, You Envelop Me takes its title from the thirty-second psalm and explores connections between birth and loss. How does one in mourning converse with those absent, yet ever present? These poems seek to enter that sturdy edifice of emptiness, wherein time is suspended, and one is paradoxically held by the departed. How is a motherless daughter conceived? What befalls those who succumb to waves of grief akin to contractions of birth? You Envelop Me is woven from contemplative practices which permit us to approach the unimaginable. The world with the beloved removed is permanently altered, perhaps most significantly in the way the living learn that indispensible vision occurs beyond the visible world.

The Book of Moments (forthcoming 2018, in two editions, one English, one French, from Presses Universitaires de rouen et du havre, Rouen, France).This book of relatively short prose fiction/hybrid pieces is an exploration in reinvention of forms: including the found, the invented and foregrounding perception as subject and object. This book seeks the boundary between real and imagined and hovers at a location often in between. This work is inspired by the revolutionary prose of writers such as Lydia Davis, Marguerite Duras, Hélène Cixous, and others writing off the map between genres, outside conventional expectations of “story.”

A poet, prose writer, teacher and editor, Laynie Browne is author of thirteen collections of poems and three novels. Her most recent collections of poems include You Envelop Me (Omnidawn 2017) P R A C T I C E (SplitLevel 2015), and Scorpyn Odes (Kore Press 2015). Recent books of prose include the novel Periodic Companions (2018) and short fiction in The Book of Moments (2018). Her honors include a 2014 Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award (2007) for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award (2005) for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese and Catalan. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies including The Norton Anthology of Post Modern Poetry (second edition 2013), Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008). She teaches at University of Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College.

Andrea Brady is a poet and Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary, University of London. Andrea’s books of poetry include The Strong Room (2016), Dompteuse (2014), Cut from the Rushes (2013), Mutability: Scripts for Infancy (2012), and Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination (2010). At Queen Mary she runs the Centre for Poetry and the Archive of the Now.

The event is free but please register with Eventbrite

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