Anthony DiPietro “Kiss & Release” & Natalie Shapero “Popular Longing” 7/24

East End Books Poets in Conversation Series Featuring: Anthony DiPietro “Kiss & Release” & Natalie Shapero “Popular Longing” 7/24 at 6pm - East End Books Ptown 389 Commercial Street.

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A meditation in a rush, kiss & release is driven by the intense voice of an observant, insistent, and emotional “I.” He’s an urban gay man who admits he’s here with a date, but you never know how the night will end. He has several loves, at least a few fuckboys, and many questions: most spells are made with words & broken by a kiss, why not the other way around? * what is more intimate than a whisper? * how long will yr wife be gone?

This poetry accuses, brags, confesses, obsesses, panics, and promises. It discos, raves, and swings. It falls in love during a hookup, but gets bored at a four-way. It woos the Zodiac; tries to get its virginity back; invents sex as a religion, mythologizes masculinity, and succumbs to its devils; kills a snake to resurrect a lover; gives a blowjob at a dirty book store; to see bad performance art; looks for love, and finds it everywhere/wherever.

DiPietro’s approach to these poems, even to poems of grief and heartache, is endlessly playful, darkhearted, lighthearted, and resplendent with anti-heroic wit and sex that charms and stings. The delight of this text does not diminish its formal and literary acumen. I tell you, this collection is a romp and a grand buffet, a paean to the urban masq, the fuckboy, and hot, thriving, fleeting love. —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

Anthony DiPietro is a gay sex poet and arts administrator originally from Providence, Rhode Island. He has lived throughout New England and in California, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee. A graduate of Brown University with honors in creative writing, he also earned a creative writing MFA at Stony Brook University. Now deputy director of Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, he resides in Worcester, MA. He composed his 2021 chapbook And Walk Through (Seven Kitchens Press) on a typewriter during the pandemic lockdowns. kiss & release is his debut collection.

God, Anthony DiPietro’s poetry is good… I’m excited in a way that makes me remember what it was like when I’d find a book as a teenager, something dangerous and contraband, something so much a lifeline, and it would speak to all those hidden parts of me with a rush of sexuality and exposure, a mirror and a flashlight. —Bryan Borland, founding publisher of Sibling Rivalry Press

The poems of Natalie Shapero’s third collection, Popular Longing, highlight the ever-increasing absurdity of our contemporary life. With her sharp, sardonic wit, Shapero deftly captures human meekness in all its forms: our senseless wars, our inflated egos, our constant deference to presumed higher powers―be they romantic partners, employers, institutions, or gods. “Why even / look up, when all we’ll see is people / looking down?” In a world where everyone has to answer to someone, it seems no one is equipped to disrupt the status quo, and how the most urgent topics of conversation can only be approached through refraction. By scrutinizing the mundane and all that is taken for granted, these poems arrive at much wider vistas, commenting on human sadness, memory, and mortality. Punchy, fearlessly ironic, and wickedly funny, Popular Longing articulates what it means to share a planet, for better or more often for worse, with other people.

Natalie Shapero’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collections Popular Longing (2021), Hard Child (2017), and No Object (2013), and she has performed at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at UC Irvine.

Event Venue

East End Books Ptown, 389 Commercial Street, Provincetown, United States