The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and Changing Hands proudly present a poetry reading with Carolina Ebeid on First Friday, September 7, 2018 at Changing Hands Phoenix (300 W Camelback Rd, Phoenix, AZ 85013) at 7 p.m. Carolina will read selections from her debut collection, You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press), along with new and other work.
While RSVPs are encouraged, they are purely for the purpose of attendance monitoring and gauging interest. You do not need to bring your registration or RSVP to the event. You do not need to register or RSVP to attend. This event is open to the public and free.
Carolina will also be teaching a workshop on list poems the following day on Saturday, September 8, 2018 at the Piper Writers House (450 E Tyler Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281). To learn more and register, you can visit the class page.
To RSVP for Carolina's reading, you can visit the eventbrite page.
About the Book
You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior emerges out of the ontological shock and double-bind of there being a world (rather than nothing at all), and inhabiting this world that “depends on violence.” Still, Carolina Ebeid writes, “I have wanted / to make you something // beautiful.” Drawing on influences such as Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum (the photographic detail that pierces the viewer) to the repertoire of circles and twirls––the veronicas––bullfighters make with the red cape to attract the bull, Ebeid explores a poetics that is at once intricate and intimate. The poems in this book move by way of metaphors and poetic turns that reveal and wound; they cover territories ranging from personal confession and diagnosis to political catastrophes such as war and exile. Witnessing again to the lyric as art of ethical reckoning, each poem in You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior is an ardent fathoming of our most interior selves, each poem in Ebeid’s long-awaited first collection is a momentary “allegory for the soul.”(Noemi Press)
Meet the Author: Carolina Ebeid
About Carolina Ebeid
Carolina Ebeid's work appears widely in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, jubilat, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, and others. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, and has won awards and fellowships from the Stadler Center for Poetry, CantoMundo, The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Academy of American Poets. She was awarded an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry for 2015.
She is a PhD candidate in the University of Denver's creative writing program, where she serves as Associate Editor of the Denver Quarterly. Her first book, You Ask Me To Talk About The Interior, was published by Noemi Press in 2016 as part of their Akrilica series. Poets & Writers Magazine selected You Ask Me To Talk About The Interior as one of the ten best debut collections in 2016. She is currently at work on a book project entitled Hide.
Carolina grew up in West New York, NJ, and now lives in Denver. Her fellow travelers include the poet Jeffrey Pethybridge and their son Patrick; together they edit Visible Binary.
More about this Author
Akbar, Kaveh. "Sometimes beauty is something I'm accused of: Carolina Ebeid." Divedapper 64.
I used to think of these little pieces as discards, or smaller fragments that would languish in a notebook. Or they just wait, they’re like little ladies in waiting and they'll be called upon sometimes to service the queen—as in the greater more cohesive poem.
Ebeid, Carolina. "All Those Gorgeous Feelings." The Paris American.
Do they haunt you? Do they hunt you out?
often they move small
and quick like a pair of humming
birds at a feeder, a tiny
and iridescent humming about
the ears, just listen, they drink-&-drink
---. "Weight." BOAAT Press.
(hush listen)
Is a caesura a quiet hallway
in a church? Is it a silence
with commandments to hush,
listen?
---. "What Hereafter's Like." The American Poetry Review, vol. 47, no. 2.
what day drinking’s like, like the sensation
of swimming without goggles in cold
water chlorine burn holding hands, what
listening through a stethoscope is like, oh
glowing second trimester—la luna é più bella
Osborne, Todd. "Poetry Spotlight: Contributor Carolina Ebeid." Memorious, December 13, 2016. You can also read Carolina's poems "Something Brighter than Pity" and "[The bridge's shadow lies across the water]."
I have a deep admiration for poets who try working in received forms—especially older or more obscure traditions [ . . . ] I don’t often look to traditional forms, however, when I begin writing a poem. I can imagine how much less anxiety I would experience over a poem (should I end here? how do I know when the poem is finished? how should it look on the page?) if a certain number of syllables and lines were already prescribed to me. Like most poets writing alongside me, I write in free verse trying to find an “organic” form for the given poem. I know I don’t have a full understanding of how the idea of form influences my work. The image that comes to mind is that of a small fire I am trying to control with a container like a lantern. The poem needs a form so that it does not fizzle out or burn the place down.
Venegas, John. "Book Review: You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior." Angel City Review, December 15, 2016.
It is perhaps most difficult to see beauty when it lives in and around something horrid. But the focus of vision does not preclude it from existing. A pristine sky is unconcerned with tragedy and violence beneath it, and there is a strength in character, I think, in having the capacity to recognize both simultaneously. That strength flows through You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior, a poetry collection written by Carolina Ebeid, in abundance.