Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center celebrate the release of Sarah Katz’s debut poetry collection, Country of Glass. Sarah is in conversation with poet Camisha L. Jones. TWC will provide a Cued Language Transliterator, CART, and an American Sign Language interpreter.
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We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online through Bookshop.org.
Sarah Katz is the author of Country of Glass, forthcoming from Gallaudet University Press in May 2022. She holds an MFA in creative writing from American University. Her poems appear in Bear Review, District Lit, Hole in the Head Review, Redivider, RHINO, Right Hand Pointing, Rogue Agent, the So to Speak blog, The Shallow Ends, and Wordgathering, among others. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Business Insider, The Guardian, OZY, The Nation, The New York Times, The Rumpus, Scientific American, Slate, The Washington Post, and other publications. Sarah is Poetry Editor of The Deaf Poets Society, an online journal that features work by writers and artists with disabilities. She is Social Media Coordinator at The Writer’s Center.
Camisha L. Jones is the author of Flare (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems – which often center experiences of hearing loss, chronic pain, gender, and race – can be found at The New York Times, Poets.org, Button Poetry, The Deaf Poets Society, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Quarry, and elsewhere. Camisha is Managing Director and Poem of the Week editor at Split This Rock, a national non-profit in DC that centers poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes change. Find her on Facebook as Poet Camisha Jones and on Twitter and Instagram as 1Camisha.
About the Book
Country of Glass is the debut poetry collection from Sarah Katz, who offers an exploration of the concept of precariousness as it applies to bodies, families, countries, and whole societies. Katz employs themes of illness, disability, war, and survival within the contexts of family history and global historical events. The collection moves through questions about identity, storytelling, displacement, and trauma, constructing an overall narrative about what it means to love while trying to survive. The poems in this book—which take the form of free verse, prose poems, sestinas, and erasures—attempt to address human fragility and what resilience looks like in a world where so much is uncertain.
“On these pages, narrative poems and brief lyrics, asides, dreams, commentaries, meditations, prose poems, line-breaks, civic poems, lyric reveries all meet to show us a world from a perspective that’s slightly bemused, slightly ironic even, but never wholly ironic, always there is a human emotion, human tenderness towards the world, always there is precision. Indeed, Country of Glass is a wonderful book.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic