Foregoing the bad crowing puns to welcome Oliver Baez Bendorf, Jenny Johnson, Urayoán Noel, and Yesenia Montilla for an amazing night of poetry that you won’t want to sleep on.
Consider the Rooster serves as an ode to a rooster’s crow, a catalyst for awakening, both literally and figuratively.
Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations. Oliver Baez Bendorf’s voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.
“In poem after poem [Bendorf] builds and rebuilds a body, a story, a desire that are at once familiar and strange, capable of brightness like any headlight but also capable of losing that light in their brokenness which makes us love them even more.”
—Natalie Diaz
“What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf’s poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. ‘Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open,’ he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside.”
—Ross Gay
Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Consider the Rooster (Nightboat 2024) and two previous collections of poems: Advantages of Being Evergreen (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019) and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State U.P., 2015). He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Publishing Triangle, CantoMundo, Vermont Studio Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Born and raised in Iowa, he now lives in Colorado.
Sinuous and sensual, the poems of In Full Velvet (Sarabande) interrogate the nuances of desire, love, gender, ecology, LGBTQ lineage and community, and the tension between a body’s material limits and the forms made possible by the imagination. Characterized by formal poise, vulnerability, and compassion, Johnson's debut collection is one of resounding generosity and grace.
Jenny Johnson is a 2015 recipient of a Whiting Award and a 2016-2017 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2012, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, and Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics.
Transversal (University of Arizona Press) takes a disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics.
Urayoán Noel is a writer, translator, and performer from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Noel is the author of ten books in English and Spanish, including the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam. Noel lives in the Bronx, is an associate professor in the Departments of English and Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, and is currently completing Neural Sea, a hybrid lipogrammatic work engaging neurodivergence, disability, queerness, and displacement.
In the book's eponymous poem, Yesenia Montilla writes, “How do you not love yourself when you / constantly survive your undoing just by being precious?" Muse Found in a Colonized Body answers this rhetorical question by populating itself with poems that range far and wide in content—observing pop culture, interrogating history, resisting contemporary injustice—but that share the spinal cord of unflinching love. As Rachel Eliza Griffiths notes, Montilla’s “powers orbit and intuit the lives of Philando Castile, Captain America, Christian Cooper, Karl Marx, Ahmaud Arbery, Eartha Kitt, and many more while stitching our wounded identities, memories, and histories in defiant poems of revision and joyous reclamation.” The vertebral odes of this collection at turns uplift desire, affirm life, celebrate protest, and condemn the violent greed of imperial usurpation that has produced the U.S. as we know it. Both in its criticism and its admiration, Muse Found in a Colonized Body calls upon its readers to rise to the occasion of these lyrics’ profound care.
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet and a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in translation. She is a CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 NYFA fellow. Her work has been published in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, and in Best of American Poetry 2020. Her first collection The Pink Box was published by Willow Books & was longlisted for a PEN award. She lives in Harlem, NY.