Meet the Authors: Dan Rosenberg and A. E. Watkins

Avid Bookshop is honored to announce an author visit, book launch, and book signing with Dan Rosenberg and A. E. Watkins, on Thursday, October 4, 2012, Thursday, from 6:30 pm to 7:30pm.

Dan Rosenberg’s first book, The Crushing Organ, won the 2011 American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and was recently published by Dream Horse Press. His poems, translations, and book reviews have appeared recently in Pleiades, American Letters & Commentary, Kenyon Review Online, and Iowa Review.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a co-editor of Transom and a Ph.D. student at UGA in Athens, GA.

A.E. Watkins is a graduate of the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California and is currently a Ph.D. student in Purdue University’s Graduate English Program. His first book – Dear, Companion – was recently published by Dream Horse Press. Individual poems can be found in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, Verse Daily and elsewhere.

Praise for The Crushing Organ:

"Dan Rosenberg drank all the great masters, took them inside, dead and alive, all alive. He explodes them and then he says: 'I want the sun to be potent and kind.' The sun listens. Or: 'The heavens are bleached out with streetlights and we all feel larger.' The reader's body reacts. Only the power of true poetry can make this happen. Here. In this book." -Tomaž Šalamun 

"At once tranquil, blighted, and ravenous in a time all its own, The Crushing Organ leaves no room for allegory, prophecy, or symbolic disclosure of any sort. Dan Rosenberg has a new kind of system where things already apprehended are things already agreed upon, which is to say filthy, annoying, and complicit in the horror these poems both survive and indict. But it is also a system for learning new joys, wakefulness, and physical kingdoms which have not yet begun. 'yellow my finger in the lily. It doesn't keep to itself.' Nor will the liberties in this striking book. To read it is to feel volition do its work on you." -Peter Richards 

"Quick, immediate, and deeply compassionate, Rosenberg's poems cover the vast range of the immanent quotidian. Through all their impossible turnings, we're nonetheless convinced that we're in the presence of the concrete, even the documentary. And while they recognize pressing catastrophe when they see it, yet they also see a way out-in a burst of flame, in storms with eyes, in a wire hanger bent to the shape of a human heart. Rosenberg has given us a tour de force of hope achieved through, rather than despite, a clear view of the current world." -Cole Swensen

Praise for Dear, Companion:

John Keats was of the belief that a "life of any worth is a continual allegory." A.E. Watkins' debut collection takes on the notion with a lovely seriousness. The brilliance in these poems isn't simply in their lyric surety-a music so unfailing it turns image melodious-but in using lyric for a purpose often neglected in contemporary poetry. The poems here become a space in which the grain of the personal is held within the furrow of the allegorical, and over the course of a year, we witness the speaker's identity suffer into symbolic sympathy. That sympathy is erotic and agricultural-that ancient twining-and allows Watkins to invoke the world of Orpheus and Eurydice into his own, all while showing his readers, as a poet must learn to do, the reciprocal consequences of having one's own life called back into the forgotten one. Well, the forgotten world save only for poems such as these, which refuse to accept the post-modern condition as a separation from our allegorical one. These are poems of wonder and nostalgia, and a reminder that such conditions are not easy, but are instead evidence of the very wound that "wondered this world green." -Dan Beachy-Quick 

Herein, a poetry that takes its time, forgoing pyrotechnics for a low, slow burn. Other elemental activity's here as well-the wind flogging the prairie; the mind dirtying itself; a glass of water having its way with a stick. Dear, Companion is a definitive bewilderment, a bountiful catalog of thought and observation and loss. Read it and reap. -Graham Foust