Felling by Kelan Nee with Nick Flynn

Kelan Nee will be in conversation with the poet, writer, and playwright Nick Flynn to celebrate his collection Felling, winner of the 2023 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. "Nee’s poems are magnificent, hard-earned, and have the resonance of art that intends to last." —Carl Phillips, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Their conversation will be followed by a signing. Copies of Felling as well as Nick Flynn's latest, Low (Graywolf, 2023), will be available for sale.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

This collection is a record of one man’s navigation of loss, addiction, and labor. At once a meditation on the allure of a legacy in self-destruction and a giving over to hope, Felling is an exploration in honesty. Rendered in direct language and through clear eyes, this book, as its title indicates, is concerned with tensions of agency, creation, and destruction— upward and downward motion.

“After the 1940 publication of Native Son, Richard Wright shared some of his stylistic goals in the novel. ‘I wanted the reader to feel that Bigger’s story was happening now,’ he writes, ‘like a play upon the stage or a movie unfolding upon the screen. Action follows action, as in a prize fight.’ Kelan Nee’s poetry delivers the immediacy and punch that Wright demanded of literature. Nee has the head for poetry, the heart for poetry, and above all, the guts. This debut collection holds back nothing and leaves me reeling with high hopes for Nee’s future in the craft.”—Gregory Fraser, judge and author of Designed for Flight and Answering the Ruins

Kelan Nee is a carpenter, and poet from Massachusetts. His debut collection Felling was released in May 2024 by and was the winner of the 2023 Vassar Miller prize. His work has appeared in Poetry, the Paris Review, the Yale Review, Adroit Journal and elsewhere. He lives in Houston where he is a PhD candidate in critical poetics and the Editor of Gulf Coast Journal.

Low explores the jaggedness of memory and what is salvageable when the past is broken by loss, violence, and trauma. Punctuating Nick Flynn’s signature lyric poems are prose pieces and sequences, veering toward essays, including “Notes on a Calendar Found in a Stranger’s Apartment,” a truly strange experience of cataloging a deceased neighbor’s belongings and how quickly they become worthless; “Notes on Thorns & Blood,” a study of time and wounds; and “Notes on a Year of Corona,” a loose sonnet crown about the early stages of the pandemic and the unrest after racist police violence.
Despite its existential reverberations, Low is a celebration of desire in all its forms—the desire for home, the desire to be held, the desire for people to be kind to one another, the desire to understand where we are from and what we can do to make the best of that. But how do we create a home, these poems ask, in a world of satellites and atom bombs and algorithms, those things designed to dehumanize and reduce us? To get low is to reconnect with the earth, to engage with the emotional state of the planet, to remember that “the cure all along grows beside us.” Flynn’s collection is a prismatic, even prophetic, experience, with new complexity and ardor at every turn.

Nick Flynn (writer, playwright, and poet) is the author of thirteen books, including Low (Graywolf, 2023) and Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. His bestselling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004) was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro (Focus Features, 2012) and has been translated into fifteen languages. Stay: Threads, Collaborations, and Conversations (Ze Books, 2020), documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York, United States