Boston Book Festival

Audre Lorde said, “Poetry is not a luxury.” To think, write, and be fully engaged with the world around us in ways that matter is nothing less than a radical act of survival. Cast across continents and centuries, matrilineage and inherited silences, Joan Kwon Glass’s Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms explores colonialism and postcolonialism through disordered eating, suicide loss, religious damage, familial estrangement, addiction, motherhood, and recovery. Matthew E. Henry’s latest collection, said the Frog to the scorpion, blurs the lines between pedagogy and prejudice, romance and anti-racism, from conversations in public school classrooms and faculty meetings, to arguments in restaurants and folding tents. Jennifer Martelli’s latest collection, Dear Justice, complicates the personal and political with a series of epistolary sonnets—addressed to conservative Supreme Court judges—that embody the struggle against gender oppression, systemic violence, and the ongoing threats to reproductive rights. In SKY.POND.MOUTH, Kevin McLellan’s poems navigate the poetic inheritance of experimental queer poets—Ashbery, Schuyler, Stein. McLellan records the inner echoes of mind and body: language and desire, illness and eros, flora and fauna, memory and moment. In poems of reclamation and warning, Anna V. Q. Ross’s Flutter, Kick plumbs motherhood, migration, childhood, and the cycles of violence and renewal that recur in each. Sponsored by Mass Poetry.

This session will feature the internationally lauded poet Marie-Célie Agnant (former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate) in conversation with Danielle Legros Georges (former Boston Poet Laureate). The writers will discuss the riveting work that appears in the newly released anthology Blue Flare, written from the standpoints of 21^st century Haitian, Caribbean and African diasporic women. Join this dynamic conversation by award-winning Haitian and American women committed to literary and cultural works that reveal, dream, instigate interrogations, express deep commitments to questions of ethics, occupy crossroads, and mine intersections. Sponsored by Mass Poetry.

Award-winning poet Cynthia Manick and renowned author and three-time United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky read from their books No Sweet Without Brine, and Proverbs of Limbo: Poems. Manick’s No Sweet Without Brine, voted one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New York Public Library, personifies love of self and culture through fresh observations and bitter truths voiced with breathtaking lyricism. In Proverbs of Limbo, Pinsky’s first new book of poetry in eight years, one of our most ambitious, inventive, and finely tuned poets, takes an original approach to the fraught, central matter of borders. Come listen to these engaging poets read their work and discuss their upcoming poems in this unmissable headline reading. Sponsored by Mass Poetry.

As we know, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In her award-winning second novel Djinns, Fatma Aydemir
tells the story of a family full of longings and disappointments who try to come together despite all their inner contradictions. Hüseyin has spent the past thirty years working in Germany, and his dream has at last come true: he has bought his very own flat in Istanbul, but dies of a heart attack the day he moves in. His family in Germany travel to Turkey for the funeral. In chapters narrated from the perspectives of the individual family members, we learn about each character’s personal djinns. Join Fatma Aydemir and Djinns' translator Jon Cho-Polizzi in a far-reaching conversation about this fast-paced and character-driven family saga set in Germany and Turkey at the end of the 20th century, focusing on the complexity of migration, family, relationships, and life choices.