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Presented in partnership with Saint Louis University Department of English and Left Bank Books.To inaugurate our National Poetry Month series of events, join us for a reading with Robert Fitterman and Safa Khatib, two poets with ties to Saint Louis whose work innovates across histories, geographies, and languages.
ABOUT THE BOOKS:
CREVE COEUR
Robert Fitterman’s sixteenth and most ambitious book transposes William Carlos Williams’s postwar long poem Paterson onto the segregated suburbs of late twentieth-century St. Louis to track the collapse of the American urban landscape.
Mirroring Paterson’s structure page-for-page, Fitterman translates Williams’s patchwork of local news stories, personal letters, and found historical documents into the landscapes and mythologies of his hometown, revisiting many of the horrific events of St. Louis and its environs on the way—the East St. Louis massacre, the demolition of social housing projects, military chemical testing in the inner city during the Cold War, and more. Through a weave of verse, archival documents, and found language, Creve Coeur entangles suburban sprawl with the racial violence at the root of American urbanization.
A DRESS OF LOCUSTS
Woven from threads of Aramaic, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Sumerian and Arabic, A Dress of Locusts is an unforgettable song cycle in which the living and dead sing back and forth to one another. Here, Safa Khatib journeys across the possibilities of language and self, asking us to dwell in the thresholds between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’.
ABOUT THE POETS:
ROBERT FITTERMAN
Robert Fitterman is the author of 16 books of poetry. His most recent book, Creve Coeur, is a long poem recently published with Winter Editions (2024). Other titles include: This Window Makes Me Feel (Ugly Duckling Presse), No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself. (Ugly Duckling Presse), Nevermind (Wonder Books) and Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books). He has collaborated with several visual artists, including Serkan Ozkaya, Nayland Blake, Sabine Herrmann, Natalie Czech, Tim Davis, and Klaus Killisch. He is the founding member of the artists-poets collective Collective Task www.collectivetask.org. He lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University.
SAFA KHATIB
Safa Khatib is a poet, translator, teacher and daughter of South Indian immigrants. She is the author of the forthcoming collection A Dress of Locusts (Bloomsbury 2025). Her current projects include a book of collages provisionally titled return service and “smoke,” a text written in collaboration with choreographer Cecil Slaughter. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Words Without Borders, Baffler, Kenyon Review and White Review. She is the recipient of support from the US Fulbright Program and the Stadler Center for Poetry, among other institutions. She is currently a PhD student in the Track for International Writers in the department of Comparative Literature at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.
Books for sale from Left Bank Books
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
High Low, 3301 Washington Blvd, St Louis, MO 63103-1118, United States,St. Louis, Missouri
