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Join us on Tuesday, November 10th at 7PM for a reading to celebrate the book release of Rivka Clifton's WRONG FEAST (Baobab Press) and Caleb True's RAÑA (University of Tampa Press), as well as a book signing and light refreshments! ABOUT RIVKA and WRONG FEAST:
In Rivka Clifton's sophomore collection, Wrong Feast, the lyric image, in all its ambiguous potential, flexes the tensions between Capitalism's mass-produced nightmares and the individually strange experiences of death, art, and queerness to depict a world both sumptuous and awry. In these poems, Clifton engages Charles Simic's surrealist question: "How to think without recourse to abstractions, logic, and categorical postulates." Clifton turns the sensory details in her poems until their most mundane aspects become uncanny--a fish becomes a purse, a dog's head deified as it is impaled on a fence, a buzzing cellphone birthed into a crib . . . These are not poems of action and consequence but ones of call and response. Page after page, Wrong Feast models close attention. Clifton fully considers the ambiguities and the possibilities within her creations, and she challenges you to do the same.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book that made new for me, to this extent, the fundamental strangeness of existence; I am grateful to Wrong Feast for reminding me how attention opens us to astonishment: in a poem, in a life.”
—Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
Rivka Clifton is the transfemme author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press,
2025) as well as the chapbooks MOT and Agape (Osmanthus Press). Clifton's work has appeared in Pleiades, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, and other magazines. She lives in Seattle.
ABOUT CALEB TRUE and RAÑA:
RAÑA weaves the life story of a pugilist from the Argentinian hinterlands and his surreal experiences in the Falklands (Malvinas) War, in which he serves, and with which he struggles for the rest of his life. Told in the style of an epic or a fable, dispatches of an anguished life accumulate, and something florid grows. It is a poetic, blink-of-an-eye phantasmagoria of modern war and inner conflict spiraling dizzyingly outward from the blood, sweat, and heat of the boxing ring.
"An exhilarating portrait of a fighter, RAÑA bursts onto the page. A novel that is completely alive in image and sentence both and that makes the reader feel alive too."
-AMINA CAIN, author of INDELICACY
“RANA is a feat of the imagination. Caleb True weaves history into his fiction with grace, soul, and dexterity. For fans of Ethan Rutherford’s’ North Sun, and anyone else curious about the hidden corners of history.”
-AMITY GAIGE, author of HEARTWOOD
"Mythic, original, deeply intelligent, even prophetic, Rana presents a boxer at the top of his game, at war with mortality and the forces of destiny. Caleb True is a writer to watch."
-JANET PEERY, National Book Award Finalist for THE RIVER BEYOND THE WORLD
Caleb True is a writer, editor, critic, musician, and podcaster. He holds an MA in History from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. He is the author of the novel RAÑA (University of Tampa Press, forthcoming July 2026), On Ruben Slikk: A Manifesto on the Purpose of Art and the Value of Transgression (Dynamo Verlag, 2024), and Chansons Russes (Quetzalcoatl 2016), a historical triptych of stories set in Soviet Russia. He has published short stories and essays in The Sonora Review, Faultline, Yemassee, Whiskey Island, and many others. He is the founder and managing editor of Dynamo Verlag (est. 2015), a boutique publishing house specializing in textual work demonstrating genius, eclecticism, and originality.
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Event venue
Third Place Books Ravenna, 6510 20th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98115-6944, United States
Tickets
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.