Join us for an evening celebrating the spoken word with acclaimed poets Todd Boss and Marci Nelligan! Both poets will read from their latest collections, Tough Luck and Ghost Manada.
At the center of Todd Boss’s Tough Luck is a poem about the ill-fated I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis and its disastrous collapse, which killed 13 people and injured 145. The freighted, swiftly moving poems in Tough Luck crisscross the chasm between peril and safety as if between opposing riverbanks, revealing a frequently heart-stopping view of the muscled waters below. Marriage, family, home―all come crashing down, but Boss rebuilds with his trademark musicality and “a reverent gusto for representing the tactile aspects of human life.”
Marci Nelligan’s Ghost Manada is a book of insistent absence in conversation with her own shade songs. The book is an intertext of experimental lyrics speaking to and through Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the spirt of Emily Dickinson. Nelligan dives into the wreck of an American mythos of unforgiving darkness, and if that were not enough, she also finds her name does not appear there. “As in this telling, woman lurk in thresholds, part captive, part threat.” Ultimately, these affecting meditations do not wait “for the ire to eat up all the air.” This is the space of the book, one that wasn’t there before Nelligan created it.
Todd Boss is the author of the poetry collections Yellowrocket and Pitch, both honored by the Midwest Bookseller’s Choice Award. He is the founding artistic director of Motionpoems, a film company in Minneapolis.
Marci Nelligan is the author of The Ghost Manada (Black Radish, 2016), Infinite Variations (Black Radish, 2011) and numerous chapbooks, and the co-editor of Intersections, an interdisciplinary book on Jane Jacobs. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boog City, Jacket, the Denver Quarterly, The New Orleans Review, How2, Fledgling Rag, and other journals. She lives in Lancaster, PA with her husband and two daughters, and runs an arts-in-education partnership between Millersville University and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
