A reading to celebrate the release of Laura Eve Engel's debut poetry collection, THINGS THAT GO.

Readers:
LAURA EVE ENGEL
NICK FLYNN

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Framed by a retelling of the Biblical story of Lot’s wife, who looked back on the destruction of her city and was transformed into a monument of its destruction, Laura Eve Engel’s muscular poems enact a long, unblinking look at symbols of American progress—trains, buildings, the vast American west—to strain against the notion of looking as passive. These poems suggest a constant and powerful movement forward as an antidote to the current moment, and to the heart’s timeless struggles with itself. This ambitious debut wrestles with the ethics of love and loss, and bears witness to our collective experience of limitless looking, reminding us that “the future is coming / and we’re all in it.”

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ADVANCE PRAISE

Laura Eve Engel’s supple, alert, dazzling, unpredictable poems are vibrantly alive: they turn and bend in daring and fantastic ways to access to new angles of vision. Things That Go bristles with a verve that works to unsettle “the signage in our minds,” expanding the seeable as these poems bring it unnervingly closer to the sayable. Engel knows “vigilance against the new appearance / of old growth / has never been enough / we must rewrite the ground.” This book is that rewriting.

— Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award

This long anticipated first collection from Laura Eve Engel is a remarkable debut! At its spine Things That Go traffics in the collision of the sacred and the irreverent and paints a landscape of noticing where even static objects perceive deeply. The poems in this book carry such deft attention to sound, image, and sense a reader might get lost in this book for hours. This is a collection to read, reread, and then read aloud to a friend. 

– sam sax, author of Bury It

As a touring musician who has spent the better part of the last decade driving circles around the American southwest, I sense a kindred spirit in Laura Eve Engel. Reading Things That Go feels like traversing the desert at high speeds—witnessing a landscape so arresting and singular that it begs you to project the film of your own memory onto it, the heat waves emanating from the highway suggesting a deep reservoir of meaning underneath. 

– Jenn Wasner, Wye Oak and Flock of Dimes

These poems exist in an eternal present, where one is continually in a state of waking. The waking is, often—movingly, thrillingly—into love. “First, building the love, which takes time. / Then making good of it, which takes forever.” Wise and open, Things That Go is both knowing, and aware of the risks of knowing. 

– Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments

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Laura Eve Engel is the recipient of fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her work has appeared in The Awl, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, PEN America, Tin House, and elsewhere. She’s in a band called The Old Year.

Nick Flynn is the author of the poetry collections My Feelings (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (Graywolf Press, 2011), Blind Huber (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Some Ether (Graywolf Press, 2000), which was the recipient of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. He is also the author of the memoirs The Reenactments (Graywolf Press, 2013), The Ticking Is the Bomb (W. W. Norton, 2010), and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), which received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, has been widely translated, and was adapted into the film Being Flynn. He was awarded the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Amy Lowell Trust. He teaches at the University of Houston and lives in Brooklyn, New York.