Join us on Thursday, September 14 at 7pm PT when Jesse Nathan joins us to celebrate the release of his collection, Eggtooth, with Armen Davoudian and Richie Hofmann at 9th Ave!
Masks Encouraged for In-Person Attendance
Or watch online at the link below
https://youtube.com/live/hZ8ASwMEyzA?feature=share
Praise for Eggtooth
"Brilliant and unexpected … This is gorgeous writing … made out of an intense, sensual sense of place.?"- Robert Hass, Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995-97, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle award, Manhae Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America
"If it can be said that the music in a poem augments reality, then Jesse Nathan's singular vision and genius locate us in opulent lyrics that enhance our meager real-world experience into songs of radiance and wonder. Here is the Gerard Manley Hopkins of the 21st-century: poignant, lively, and sprung, and here are eminently Orphic poems written to reverberate through the ages."- Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man and Leaving Saturn, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry
About Eggtooth
In this debut collection, Jesse Nathan matches an exquisite feeling for the music of lines and sentences with his profound explorations of the idea of home. The book's title comes from the word for a bit of cartilage on a baby bird's beak, a growth that helps it break out of the egg. Shortly after the bird hatches, the tooth disappears. Like an eggtooth, Nathan's poems are often figures for birth, for the violence of birth and, in his case, rebirth. They follow an unusual and passionate boy from his childhood on a wheat farm in the watershed of the Running Turkey Creek in rural southcentral Kansas - "the land was always the solace" - to his life years later in a coastal city.
Ecology, family, history, sexuality, and poetry itself are his subjects, but in all these matters, Nathan's rich formal imagination travels our fundamental feelings of alienation and belonging. In a style somehow both lavish and plainspoken, in free verse and inherited forms, Eggtooth takes us from straw-bale fortresses in the hayloft, from fishing in streams and days so hot the "blank road shimmers" as the heat drives you out of your "straw-frail" mind, to the respite and loneliness of a far-off city plaza, to the "waves in their folding" at the edge where an ocean comes "boiling" onto sand. With verbal precision and abiding sympathy, Nathan's poems announce a capacious and deeply compelling new voice in American letters.
About Jesse Nathan
Jesse Nathan was raised in northern California and rural Kansas. He teaches literature at UC Berkeley, and he was a founding editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series. His poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The New Republic. This is his first book.
About Armen Davoudian
Armen Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars, forthcoming from Tin House Books in March 2024. His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry magazine, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the 2020 Frost Place Competition. Armen grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.
About Richie Hofmann
Richie Hofmann is the author of two books of poems, A Hundred Lovers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022) and Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015). His poetry appears recently in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review, and has been honored with the Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships.
“In this formally radical debut, Armen Davoudian shows how rhyme enacts longing for a homeland left behind; how meter sings to a lost beloved; and how a combination of the two can map a self—or idea of the self—relinquished so that a new life, and all the happiness it deserves, can take shape.”—Paul Tran
An erotic journal in poems, from a rising star in the American poetry scene, author of the highly acclaimed collection Second Empire.