Tuesday, May 26th at 7pm: GC Waldrep and Jennifer Kronovet read

G.C. Waldrep’s Archicembalo, selected by judge C.D. Wright to be winner of the Dorset Prize, is an acerbic, whimsical, and deeply intelligent fusion of poetry and music.

The book is structured like the “gamuts” or musical self-instruction primers that often prefaced volumes of 19th-century American sheet music. Straddling a pliable line between prose and poetry, these poems draw on Waldrep’s undergraduate training as a singer (tenor/countertenor) and conductor of early repertoire. They seek a median distance between a singer’s voice, embodying the abstraction of pure music, and a poet’s voice, ingrained with the specificity of human language.

Waldrep has said, “I was interested in writing about music in language, but on music’s terms, in music’s vocabulary of phrase and affect, its logic of composition and performance. The poems are a kind of mental music: They are meant to take shape in the reader’s mind, as music.”

In her Foreword to Awayward, National Book Award-winning poet Jean Valentine writes, “Jennifer Kronovet’s poems in Awayward are so surprising and compelling and beautiful, so intelligent and felt. Kronovet uses simple words and works at a mysterious depth, one we can enter with gladness.”

Written while Kronovet was living in Beijing, Awayward illuminates the sense of disconnect that travelers experience when their major touchstones of language and geography are altered. These poems wander the world, drifting in and out of conversations that are alternately comical and grave.

“Nothing strikes me/ as incredibly ‘foreign,’” says Kronovet in her whimsical, searching debut, selected by Jean Valentine for BOA’s A. Poulin Jr. prize…In every poem, Kronovet searches ‘the corners/ of fact’ and finds unusual things in plain sight…These free verse lyrics, stacks of narrow couplets, prose poems and poems in two lines are at once endearing and deadly serious.