The Blog

You know how, when you go out for drinks with writer friends, the conversation always devolves into a lament about the state of literary culture in America, and someone makes a zealous fist and says we need to go further than lit mags, we need to bring poetry to the people! and someone else says wouldn't it be great to just get in a van and, you know, just go DO that? 

Well, six poets are.  

This summer, Adam Atkinson, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Zachary Harris, Ben Pelhan, S.E. Smith, and Anne-Marie Rooney (a TIR alum!) are climbing into a van and driving across the midwest, mid-atlantic, and northeast U.S. to give readings, performances, and free poetry and literary arts workshops at libraries and community spaces.

Certain topics are so heart-wrenching that we find them difficult to express in literal terms. Lauren Berry’s debut collection The Lifting Dress—winner of Penguin’s 2010 National Poetry Series, selected by Terrance Hayes—explores the possibilities of figuration in post-traumatic narrative by opening up a broader palate of symbolism to confront the violence of one of the most monstrous human transgressions: rape.

Set in the humid-yawn of a watermarked Gulf Coast city, not unlike the small Florida town of the poet’s childhood home, Berry’s collection is grounded in the representation of a young girl’s emotional derangement and eventual coming-of-age in the threatening stalk of memory. The poems take us directly inside her synthesizing head.