Poetry and Conversation with Tom Sleigh and Daniel Lawless (IN PERSON)

Please join hosts Sally Bliumis Dunn and Estha Weiner in person on Sunday, April 28, 4 PM at HVWC in Sleepy Hollow, NY, for Poetry and Conversation with Tom Sleigh and Daniel Lawless.

Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry, including his most recent book, The King’s Touch, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and published by Graywolf Press in Feburary 2022. Other works include Army Cats, winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk which won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award. In addition, Far Side of the Earth won an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Dreamhouse was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and The Chain was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. Station Zed was published in 2015 and includes his long poem about Iraq, “Homage to Basho,” a version of which received Poetry Magazine’s Editors Prize. In 2018 a book of prose collecting his essays on refugees in the Middle East and Africa, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In An Age Of Refugees, was published simultaneously by Graywolf Press as a companion piece to House of Fact, House of Ruin. He has also published a previous book of essays, Interview With a Ghost, and a translation of Euripides’ Herakles. Widely anthologized, his poems and prose appear in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Threepenny, The Village Voice, and other literary magazines, as well as The Best of the Best American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Best American Travel Writing, and The Pushcart Anthology. He has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, a Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, an Individual Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many others.

Praise for The King’s Touch:

“Generous, meticulous, haunted and grounded, ‘The King’s Touch’ handles contemporary life with alertness and compassion for a world in which ‘A Man Plays Debussy for a Blind, Eighty-Four-Year-Old Female Elephant’ while friends kill themselves and voices urge, ‘You’re better off dead, you useless piece of shit.’ The piano player ‘shuts his eyes and leans his forehead against hers,’ Sleigh imagines; ‘it’s like each one’s/listening to what the other one’s thinking.’ Sleigh’s business, like Dickinson’s, is circumference; though he can’t erase the voices that drive individuals and nations mad, they can be subsumed in music. Reading ‘The King’s Touch’ is an extraordinary pleasure not to be missed. ” — JOYCE PESEROFF, ARROWSMITH PRESS

“The conflict poems (for lack of a better term) are invariably gripping, especially when they involve the speaker learning how to use a rocket-propelled grenade, as in ‘Practice Range.’ And, as if an RPG poem isn’t heavy enough on its own, Sleigh’s decision to reveal, via a note below the poem’s title, that ‘Practice Range’ takes place in Erbil, Kurdistan lends the poem additional significance…In ‘The King’s Touch,’ Sleigh excels at seeing and interpreting the world as it is, on its own merits. It’s a fine addition to his ever-longer body of work.” — KEVIN O’ROURKE, MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW

Daniel Lawless is the author of several books of poetry, most recently I Tell You This Now (Červená Barva Press, 2024) . Recent poems appear in FIELD, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Los Angeles Review, upsteet, SOLSTICE, Manhattan Review, Massachusetts Review, JAMA, and Dreaming Awake: New Prose Poetry from the U.S., Australia, and the U.K., among others. A recipient of a continuing Shifting Foundation grant, he is the founder and editor of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, Plume Editions, and the annual Plume Poetry anthologies.

Praise for I Tell You This Now:

“In joy and terror all at once, the shining elegies and buoyant love poems of I Tell You This Now by Daniel Lawless unfold. Lawless has the uncanny ability to create piercing elegies that behave like tender breakup poems. His love poems are no less sublime. (After minutely describing a farmer’s vintage tools, he dissolves them to lingerie… The result is a love poem that ends both very far yet very close indeed to those historical implements.) One of the deep pleasures of reading I Tell You This Now is that you never know quite where you’re going until you get there. And getting there means getting it: the shock of gorgeous and gruesome recognition in each upturned world in Daniel Lawless’s remarkable poems.”— MOLLY PEACOCK

In honor of National Poetry Month, attendees of HVWC’s IN-PERSON Readings will receive THREE contest-winning titles from Slapering Hol Press.