I am out of my mind excited.
That's just true.
OK.
I was raised Pentecostal in a place called Hixson, Tennessee.
This is just a couple of hours away from Nashville,
which is where one of our readers, Tiana Clark,
spent her childhood and is back.
For those of you who are not familiar with Pentecostal
practices, it's not uncommon for us
to run up and down the aisles with both excitement and fear,
or to roll around on the floor laughing, crying,
and speaking in tongues.
Even though I was eventually excluded
from these practices because of my trans and queer existence,
the Pentecostal Church is really where I first
understood what language and the body together make possible.
This is something akin to what Alice Walker calls,
quote, "the collective vulnerability of presence,"
and of which she says, "we need not be afraid."
All of this is to say trigger warning.
I'm no longer religious, but when
it comes to these two authors, Monica Sok and Tiana
Clark, and their work, I feel the charismatic in me rise up.
And so the spirit is going to say what the spirit thinks
needs to be said.
Speaking of Alice Walker, in her book,
Anything We Love Can Be Saved, a writer's activism,
which if y'all don't know that book, it's time.
She says, "there is always a moment in any kind of struggle
when one feels in full bloom, vivid, alive.
To be such a person or to witness anyone
at that moment of transcendent presence
is to know that what is human is linked by a daring compassion
to what is divine."
This is exactly how I feel reading both of your work.
And if it is true what Simone Weil says
that absolute unmixed attention is prayer, then
these poems, as they face white supremacy anti-Black racism,
historical violence, genocide, and its attendant erasures,
all with a clarity and lyric muscularity that
is unforgettable, then these poems
are teaching us what it looks like to hold
God and other power-hungry creeps accountable,
which is to say they are teaching us how to pray.
Yet this work is not about being fearless, as Monica explains.
It's about making eye contact with power.
It's about, quote, "making an experience visible to those
who treat it as invisible.
And it is about moving toward love and tenderness
at the same time as moving towards suffering and pain."
Monica's first book, as we've mentioned,
is available tonight for the first time, is titled A Nail
the Evening Hangs On.
And Tiana's first book, I Can't Talk About the Trees
Without the Blood, is also available after the reading.
From different vantage points and in different but equally
stunning ways, both poets utilize
persona, personal narrative, research, and history.
And while they are both masterful,
there is something much more urgent than mastery at stake.
As Tiana says in the Kenyon Review,
I haven't stopped thinking about this idea of catching up
to my own courage, both in my life and on the page.
I stopped caring as much about prestige.
I am writing to save my own life.
Both authors elucidate the effects
of individual and collective trauma while, quote,
"resisting," as Monica says in an interview with the poet Jane
Wong, the trauma gaze.
She adds, "I'm going to be subversive.
I'm going to write this poem and say I'm alive
and I made it here.
I want my Cambodian-American community
to know that they are going to be OK."
Monica Sok is a Cambodian-American poet
and the daughter of former refugees.
She's the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On,
out from Copper Canyon Press.
Her work has been recognized with the Discovery Prize
from 92Y.
She has received fellowships and residencies.
There's a long list here, which I love--
it's like, yes-- more!
She's currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
And she's a originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection,
I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2018, which was also the winner of the 2017
Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize.
And "Equilibrium," Bowl City Press 2016,
selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place
Chapbook Competition.
Clark is a finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery
Award, which we're going to find out about and like a week.
So February 22, all the energy--
it's right there.
It's right there.
She's published in 1,000 places.
She's amazing.
And what I really want to say is to please join me
in celebrating our luck in witnessing these two
poets, their transcendent presences and voice
and on the page.
[APPLAUSE]