An Evening of New Poetry with Catherine Barnett, Malachi Black, & Jana Prikryl (In Person at HVWC)

Join Jennifer Franklin, Program Director, and Sophia Bannister, as we welcome Catherine Barnett & Malachi Black as they read from their new collections.

Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, Human Hours, winner of the Believer Book Award, and The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, was named one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2024, and, more specifically, one of the five best poetry collections of the year! She lives in New York City and teaches at NYU.

Malachi Black is the author of Indirect Light, Four Way Books, 2024) and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. Black teaches at the University of San Diego and lives in California.

Jana Prikryl is the author of Midwood (Norton, 2024) and two previous poetry collections, The After Party and No Matter. Born in the former Czechoslovakia, she is a Guggenheim Fellow, among other honors, and the executive editor of The New York Review of Books.

Praise for the Books:

“Barnett’s fourth collection applies a quirky eye and sparkling intelligence to the topic of loneliness.”—The New York Times Book Review

“The stunning latest from Barnett (Human Hours) blends the witty and the philosophical to offer a study in ‘restricted fragile materials,’ or the bewildering condition of being alive. Urbane, perceptive, and starkly humane, these are poems of quiet alarm, at once companionable and singular.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“There is a devastating down-to-earth marriage of wit and elegy in Barnett’s transcendent fourth collection, which opens in childhood. . . .”—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub

“Through poems of startling clarity and delicate humor, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space grapples with the ontological absurdity of our large-scale and everyday failures, finding space to elegize and celebrate both what we can and cannot control.”—James Ciano, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Black’s powerful second collection immerses readers in the gritty New York City of his youth… crafting intimate narratives with expansive existential musings…. Throughout, Black transforms memory from historical fact to lived experience… these poems shine with a melancholic beauty.” — Publishers Weekly

“This is a book of great, life-making lyricism. Every word of Indirect Light sings.” — Shane McCrae

“Here, as in a seance, Malachi Black calls forth spirits from a hazardous youth in the opioid-infected suburbs of New York City, a youth measured in lovers and users, in the early deaths of friends, in evenings spent in back-alleys…. Indirect Light is not a book about redemption; instead, it is a book about a more complicated grace that might arise from thought, memory, memorial, and art.  Black’s technical skill, his mastery of the music of poetry, is as breathtaking as the intelligence and feeling that live in these poems.”— Kevin Prufer

“Reading Malachi Black’s Indirect Light feels like being on the receiving end of Tennyson’s In Memoriam shot through a many-prismed lens, as the intensity of the collection’s longing reaches toward many persons, its grieving a flowering out…. Black’s much-anticipated second book is a significant contribution to the ongoing tradition of the elegiac form.” — Cate Marvin

“Midwood makes clear and unmistakable the increasing singularity of [Jana Prikryl’s] artistry.” —Nathan Blansett, Los Angeles Review of Books

Midwood is a restless and intimate volume from a poet James Wood has called “one of the most original voices of her generation.”

In her third book, Jana Prikryl probes the notion of midlife, when past and future blur in the equidistance. Balancing formal innovation with deeply personal reflection, Midwood subtly but impiously explores love and sex and marriage and motherhood in plain, urgent language. Written for the most part early every morning over the course of a year, in all its changing seasons, Midwood includes a series of poems looking at and talking to trees; Prikryl’s careful attention to the ordinary world outside the window forms an alternative measure of time that leafs and ramifies. With their rapid shifts of scale and unusual directness, these poems find a new language for confronting our moment.