Nov
5
12:00am
Grubbie Debut: Sara Daniele Rivera, author of The Blue Mimes, in conversation with Eson Kim
By Porter Square Books
Porter Square Books: Boston Edition and GrubStreet are delighted to present the latest installment of the Grubbie Debut event series, featuring poet Sara Daniele Rivera! Join us for a celebration of her poetry collection The Blue Mimes on Monday, November 4 at Porter Square Books: Boston Edition (50 Liberty Dr. Boston, Ma 02210). Poet Eson Kim will join Rivera in conversation, and the author talk will be followed by a signing line.
Register below to attend on Crowdcast.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This event is co-presented by GrubStreet and Porter Square Books
ABOUT THE BLUE MIMES
Sara Daniele Rivera’s award-winning debut is a collection of sprawling elegy in the face of catastrophic grief, both personal and public. From the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election through the COVID-19 pandemic, these poems memorialize lost loved ones and meditate on the not-yet gone—all while the wider-world loses its sense of connection, safety, and assurance. In those years of mourning, The Blue Mimes is a book of grounding and heartening resolve, even and especially in the states of uncertainty that define the human condition.
Rivera’s poems travel between Albuquerque, Lima, and Havana, deserts and coastlines and cities, Spanish and English—between modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of the self. In those inevitable fractures, with honest, off-kilter precision, Rivera vividly renders the ways in which the bereft become approximations of themselves as a means of survival, mimicking the stilted actions of the people they once were. Where speech is not enough, this astonishing collection finds a radical practice in continued searching, endurance without promise—the rifts in communion and incomplete pictures that afford the possibility to heal.
PRAISE FOR THE BLUE MIMES
“Sara Daniele Rivera’s poems are fractals of home, landscape and beloveds. They begin in losses and end and begin again in rhythmic half-details. English wraps to Spanish in which grief is constantly pulsing, breaking every turbulence into pattern. Rivera writes ‘I want to believe death is only a pause / in our continuous language.’ As readers, we accompany the poet in her search for endurance. The Blue Mimes is a beautiful collection, pointing us to look in tender directions, and figuring a gestalt made from contemporary terrors and the plainsong of ancestors.”—Lauren Camp
“This collection of 27 poems is bursting with sound and light, even as it reckons with a multitude of griefs, both personal and public.” —Sara Beth West, Shelf Awareness
“Through different forms and frames, Rivera’s poems traverse feelings while rearranging the wounds. . . . Rivera’s code-switching, the alternating possibilities offered in the poems happen comfortably, though not necessarily in a comforting way. But the speaking endures.”—Lúcia Leão, RHINO
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban Peruvian American artist, writer, translator, and educator. Her writing has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Solstice, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Eson Kim (she/her) serves as the Director of Faculty & Fellowships at GrubStreet, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her stories have appeared in Calyx Journal, Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, among others. She received a Writing Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and earned the David B. Saunders Award for creative nonfiction. She was also named to the Notable list of Best American Essays and is a graduate of the Novel Incubator Program at GrubStreet where she loves any opportunity to talk about books for all ages, preferably while sipping on a tall glass of bubble tea.
ABOUT GRUBSTREET
Celebrating over 25 years as the nation's leading and largest independent center for creative writing, GrubStreet is the place where writers develop their craft – and themselves – through the power of writing and sharing their work. GrubStreet offers hundreds of creative writing programs and events for writers from all backgrounds and ages at its Center for Creative Writing in the Seaport, in many Boston neighborhoods, and online. Scholarships are available for all offerings, and many programs are free. At its center, GrubStreet also hosts a community lounge, a podcast studio, Porter Square Books: Boston Edition, and a Writers’ Stage. Learn more at www.grubstreet.org.
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