What: Trey Moody and Carolina Hotchandani will read from and sign their books, Autoblivion and The Book Eaters, respectively
When: Wednesday, October 25th, at 6:00 p.m.
Where: The Bookworm, 2501 So. 90th St., Ste. 111
About: Trey Moody will read from and sign his brand new poetry collection, Autoblivion, joined by Carolina Hotchandani who will read from and sign The Book Eaters.
Autoblivion traces the difficulties of raising a young child in the Anthropocene. Haunted by the looming, seeming inevitability of environmental collapse, the poems invoke traditional storytelling genres such as the parable and fairy tale to look back to the past for models of looking forward into the unknown. The collection also explores threads of love and loss including my father's sudden death when I was a child. With the understanding of the future itself as an unavoidable oblivion, ultimately the collection serves as a love letter to a daughter and her childhood, an act of preserving what can be preserved for this moment only, and an act of preparing for an opaque future.
Trey Moody was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. His first book, Thought That Nature (Sarabande Books, 2014), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. A graduate of Texas State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he has received the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and his poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Believer, and New England Review. He teaches at Creighton University and lives with his daughter in Omaha, Nebraska.
In Carolina Hotchandani's debut The Book Eaters, the poet's desire for agency over her life's narrative is counterbalanced by her awareness that poetry is written precisely when life wrests control from us. This book, conceived in loss, examines shifts in identity due to Partition, immigration, illness, and birth. As roles evolve and dissolve, the poet witnesses the decay of language, artifacts, and history, yet these erasures are also generative: they beget poetic creation. The Book Eaters is a study in belonging as well—our bodies, our memories, our stories, ourselves, our families, our cultures. Hotchandani's poems interrogate what it means to be full or empty (of words, of the past, of another human being); they illuminate our inextricability from our creaturehood. Even as they explore unraveling—through the metaphor of insects that devour the very pages we produce—these poems are tightly woven into an exquisitely crafted, cohesive collection.
Carolina Hotchandani is a Latinx/South Asian poet born in Brazil and raised in various parts of the United States. She holds degrees from Brown, Texas State, and Northwestern universities and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Community of Writers, Napa Valley Writers' Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, and Tin House Writers' Workshop. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska, where she lives with her husband and daughter.
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