Downtown Poetry Reading

Overview

Join us at Subtext Books on Saturday, July 25th from 7 to 8 PM to hear from poets Mitchell Jacobs & Charlie Peck.

Mitchell Jacobs is a poet and translator from Minnesota. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review, among other journals. He is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where he serves as managing editor of Ricochet Editions.

At the core of Rogue Astronaut, Mitchell Jacobs’s debut poetry collection, is a mystery: Was the poet’s father abducted by aliens as a teenager? From this uncanny family lore spins a gravitational field of theory, grief, and imagination, spurring speculations about the extraterrestrial as well as the terrestrial question of familial bonds: What are the limits of understanding between two alien anatomies, between two unlike minds? Are we, after all, finally alone?

Charlie Peck grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and received his MFA from Purdue University. His poetry has appeared previously in Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Massachusetts Review, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. His first collection, World’s Largest Ball of Paint, is the winner of the 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press.

Charlie Peck’s debut collection World’s Largest Ball of Paint began with a world record. Through a series of fragmented narrative poems, World’s Largest Ball of Paint navigates place and self, memory and remembering. Peck uses a cast of characters and poetic form to reckon with the past and the present, layer by layer