The 22nd Bourne Poetry Reading

Thursday, November 2, 2023
7:00 pm Eastern Time

In-Person Event
Cypress Theater @Georgia Tech Student Center

Free and Open to the public

No RSVP or registration required

Poetry@TECH

invites you to

The 22nd Bourne Poetry Reading

with

Victoria Chang, Vievee Francis, and James Davis May

Thursday, 02 November, 2023

at the Cypress Theater, Georgia Tech Student Center

Reception: 6:00 pm ET
Reading: 7:00 pm ET

The reading is FREE and open to the public.

For more information, contact Travis Denton via email at travis.denton@lmc.gatech.edu .

Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang’s forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World will be published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021.  (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), her prior book of poems received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Griffin International Prize, as well as long-listed for the National Book Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech.

Bio at Poetry@Tech

Poet's Website

Vievee Francis

Vievee Francis is the author of The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006).

Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, 2019, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She is the recipient of the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

Bio at Poetry@Tech

Vievee's University of Dartmouth webpage

James Davis May

James Davis May is the author of two poetry collections, Unquiet Things (Louisiana State University Press, 2016), and Unusually Grand Ideas (Louisiana State University Press, 2023).

May has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Originally from Pittsburgh, he now lives in Macon, Georgia, where he directs the creative writing program at Mercer University.

Bio at Poetry@Tech

Poet's Website

Location

This fall, after a three year hiatus (for obvious reasons), Poetry@Tech is returning to in-person events. And guess what, We also have a brand-new home: The Cypress Theater in the Georgia Tech Student Center.

The Cypress Theater: Directions & Information

The Cypress Theater (https://studentcenter.gatech.edu/student-center/rooms/cypress) will be Poetry@Tech's new home, after over two decades in the Kress Auditorium at the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking.

With space for an audience of 165 people, and a large banqueting area, the Cypress Theater will be a wonderful venue for our future readings.

The Cypress theater is located on the first level, at the southeast corner of Georgia Tech's newly-renovated John Lewis Student Center building (https://studentcenter.gatech.edu/student-center), located at 350 Ferst Dr NW, Atlanta, GA 30332.

Please see the maps below for directions to the Student Center and to the Cypress Theater.

Book Sales

As always, A Cappella Books, Atlanta’s oldest independent bookstore will be our official book sales partner for this event. We hope you’ll get a copy (or three) of books by our wonderful featured poets. You can order at the following links:

Recent Books

Victoria Chang, The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022)
Victoria Chang, OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)
Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Milkweed Editions, 2021)
Vievee Francis, The Shared World: Poems (Northwestern University Press, 2023)
Vievee Francis, Forest Primeval (Triquarterly, 2015)
James Davis May, Unusually Grand Ideas (LSU Press, 2023)
James Davis May, Unquiet Things (LSU Press, 2016)

Selected Poems

Vievee Francis

Break Me and I'll Sing

My voice like marrow, a blood-yolk
spilled upon the counter. You can't stop this
song. More hands than yours have closed
around my throat. You may crack me.
You have cracked me. I'm frightened
but so what? I'll testify. Witness,
if you can, listen: I slurped the frog-leg soup
gone bad. Held a brass spoon like a barrel
to my mouth. I could tell you what you want
to hear, but I'd be broken just the same,
so why not sing?
I'm singing now. louder this time and in the round:
We are a-wounding of red-plumed birds. Every voice,
a bloody feather in the bone crown.

(from The Shared World: Poems, 2023)
www.google.com/books/edition/The_Shared_World/-GevEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

Victoria Chang

OBIT

My Mother’s Teeth—died twice, once in 1965, all pulled out from gum disease. Once again on
August 3, 2015. The fake teeth sit in a box in the garage. When she died, I touched them, smelled
them, thought I heard a whimper. I shoved the teeth into my mouth. But having two sets of teeth
only made me hungrier. When my mother died, I saw myself in the mirror, her words in a ring
around my mouth, like powder from a donut. Her last words were in English. She asked for a
Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese. I wonder what her last thought was. I
used to think that a dead person’s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for
meaning to attach to like a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow
bowl. I pass the tree each spring.  I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t
know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.

(from OBIT, Copper Canyon Press, 2020)
via Poetry Magazine, 2019
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/151141/obit-5d8d0cffc5885

James Davis May

Sentimental Hogwash

A man who hasn’t thought seriously about killing himself

in over a year walks out of the living room

as the father in the movie stumbles toward the bridge

in order to jump from it. There are, after all,

things to do in the kitchen, pans to soak

and plates to rinse, and no one is watching him,

or the movie for that matter, his wife trudging

through a stack of student papers, his daughter

drawing dragons on a sketch pad, and the feeling

unfurling like a fever was so mild at first it seemed silly,

something that until then was dormant but now threatened

to make him cry, and though he isn’t afraid to cry

in front of his family, he didn’t want to this time

because they might worry, and then he would worry

that the depression was coming back again.

It’s snowing in the movie, the actor’s face obscured

by a five o’clock shadow and a sizzling agony

that’s surprising for a supposedly heartwarming film.

The lie is that seeing the world without you

will make enduring this world easier,

that you’re some sort of butterfly flapping its wings

birthing not a hurricane but a music that saves

everyone you love from ruin. The truth is

the world would be just as terrible without you

as it is with you in it, give or take a little pain

and pleasure. There’s nothing left to do

in the kitchen, so the man sits back down

and watches the father and the angel shivering

as they save each other in different ways,

and then the man’s wife looks at him and says,

“Thanks for coming back. We get lonely

when you leave,” and he apologizes and promises

to stay until the end, a scene that he knows

is sappy but loves anyway, even though

it will make him cry a little, just loudly enough

that he can’t pretend that no one notices him.

(from Rattle, Dec 2022)
via www.rattle.com/sentimental-hogwash-by-james-davis-may/

The 22nd Bourne Poetry Reading

Poetry@TECH

Victoria Chang

Vievee Francis

James Davis May

Location

The Cypress Theater: Directions & Information

Book Sales

Recent Books

Selected Poems

Vievee Francis

Break Me and I'll Sing

Victoria Chang

OBIT

James Davis May

Sentimental Hogwash

Poetry@Tech

Georgia Institute of Technology

General

Legal