Emily Kingery at the Davenport Public Library Eastern Avenue Branch -- April 6.
Thursday, April 6, 6 p.m.
Davenport Public Library Eastern Avenue Branch, 6000 Eastern Avenue, Davenport IA
In celebration of National Poetry Month, the Davenport Public Library's Eastern Avenue Branch will host a special reading with acclaimed local author Emily Kingery, her April 6 reading featuring selections from the St. Ambrose University professor's debut poetry chapbook Invasives.
Kingery is a poet and professor of English at St. Ambrose in Davenport, as well as a member of the Midwest Writing Center's board of directors, and her work appears widely in national journals. She has been selected for several honors and awards in poetry and prose, including the 2022 Laureate Prize and 2022 Pablo Neruda Prize, with Kingery's debut poetry chapbook Invasives a semi-finalist in the New Women’s Voices Series and a finalist at Harbor Editions and Thirty West Publishing House.
Praising Invasives in Little Voice magazine, Sarah Elgation said, "What really gives these poems power is their bald-faced realism. The language is often flowery, but the images depicted here are disaster photography. They are high-contrast black-and-whites of crime scenes and personal tragedy, the best of which combine soft, natural elements with the grit of drugs or basement parties. As in 'Tricks,' 'I have read enough / to know I am half-gone already. I have cut enough flesh / that when the crosscut saw is flourished in the garden for the final trick, my body will disappear on its own.' There are poems in here about happy things, beautiful moments of confidence and change, and the collection even gives opportunity to the reader to choose their own adventure with the way the book ends. Invasives is a fever-dream journey through trauma, but you get through it."
Soldier On author Gale Marie Thompson, meanwhile, raved, "In Emily Kingery’s Invasives, the past has a volatile life of its own: it appears and reappears, casts and recasts itself among the speaker’s present, with the power to heal as well as to poison. How do you own disorder? an early poem echoes, and this becomes our objective: How do you claim presence in a past that was dependent on your disappearance? How do you logic or language your way out of a past where logic and language were not yours in the first place? ... Kingery’s crisp language rings in each line, making each one work like an unpredictable, alchemic ritual. What we bury, and what buries us, is never too far away from the surface, never too far away to transform our present: 'We forgot to clear our histories,' Kingery’s speaker confesses. 'We unsubscribed, but the seeds could keep in the soil / for a decade, longer. / They could be so hard to control.'”
Emily Kimgery's poetry reading will take place at the Davernport Public Library's Eastern Avenue branch on April 6, participation in the 6 p.m. event is free, and more information is available by calling (563)326-7832 and visiting DavenportLibrary.com.
