The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore welcome poets David Ebenbach and Melanie McCabe for a virtual reading and discussion in celebration of their newest books.
Free and open to the public, limited space, registration required. Please view and agree to [link id=’2132036′ text=’COVID Policies’] before attending our live events.
David Ebenbach is the author of numerous books of fiction (How to Mars, Miss Portland, The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy, Into the Wilderness, Between Camelots), poetry (Some Unimaginable Animal, We Were the People Who Moved), and essays (The Artist’s Torah). He lives very happily with his family in Washington, DC, where he teaches creative writing at Georgetown University.
Melanie McCabe‘s poetry collection, What The Neighbors Know, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2014, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Library of Virginia’s Literary Awards competition. Her first collection, History of the Body, was published by David Robert Books in 2012. Her nonfiction book, His Other Life: Searching for My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize, and a feature article about it appeared in The Washington Post in December of 2017. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Threepenny Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Her work has also appeared on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in Best New Poets 2010. She lives in Falls Church, Virginia, and taught high school English for twenty-two years.
About the Books
How does one live in a world that is both beautiful and broken―a world of cherry blossoms and gun violence, fellowship and political enmity, plague and rebirth? What’s Left to Us by Evening, David Ebenbach’s unsparing and timely new poetry collection, examines the obligation―and privilege―of carrying all these things. The wide-ranging influences on the poems in Ebenbach’s third collection include Judaism, the Japanese poetic tradition, the natural and built environments, and current events.
Melanie McCabe’s third collection [The Night Divers] moves like a record, cyclical and singing. These elegiac poems turn over the tender and fraught intimacy of two sisters—one gone and one left to tell their story. The reader is invited into their shared history via a wonderfully precise imagination that is grounded in the real. This speaker is haunted, not by spirits, but by the physical world that her sister has departed, as in the opening of “Days That Should Have Been Yours”: “Damp earth and honeysuckle rise into the air / I am left with.” Each poem brims with a quiet intensity. As a collection, they hover like a murmuration—cohesive, sensual, just high enough to see everything clearly. —Danielle Cadena Deulen