Bookshop West Portal is celebrating Poetry Month! We're pleased to welcome poets Joy Priest and Aurielle Marie for a lively convesation. Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower: Poems. Aurielle Marie is the author of Gumbo YA YA: Poems. Both of these books are huge staff favorites. This event is free to attend and will be hosted virtually so that you can join from anywhere!

Joy Priest's debut collection, Horsepower, is a cinematic escape narrative that radically envisions a daughter's waywardness as aspirational. Across the book's three sequences, we find the black-girl speaker in the midst of a self-imposed exile, going back in memory to explore her younger self--a mixed-race child being raised by her white supremacist grandfather in the shadow of Churchill Downs, Kentucky's world-famous horseracing track--before arriving in a state of self-awareness to confront the personal and political landscape of a harshly segregated Louisville. Out of a space that is at once southern and urban, violent and beautiful, racially-charged and working-class, she attempts to transcend her social and economic circumstances. Across the collection, Priest writes a horse that acts as a metaphysical engine of flight, showing us how to throw off the harness and sustain wildness. Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, Priest presents a non-linear narrative in which the speaker lacks the freedom to come of age naively in the urban South, and must instead, from the beginning, possess the wisdom of "the horses & their restless minds."

Gumbo Ya Ya, Aurielle Marie's stunning debut, is a cauldron of hearty poems exploring race, gender, desire, and violence in the lives of Black gxrls, soaring against the backdrop of a contemporary South. These poems are loud, risky, and unapologetically rooted in the glory of Black gxrlhood. The collection opens with a heartrending indictment of injustice. What follows is a striking reimagination of the world, one where no Black gxrl dies "by the barrel of the law" or "for loving another Black gxrl." Part familial archival, part map of Black resistance, Gumbo Ya Ya catalogs the wide gamut of Black life at its intersections, with punching cultural commentary and a poetic voice that holds tenderness and sharpness in tandem. It asks us to chew upon both the rich meat and the tough gristle, and in doing so we walk away more whole than we began and thoroughly satisfied.

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. She is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and she has won the Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, The Atlantic, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others, as well as in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, and ESPN. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Houston.

Aurielle Marie is a Black and Queer poet, essayist, and cultural strategist surviving state violence. They are the author of Gumbo Ya Ya and the winner of the 2020 Cave Canem poetry prize.  She is a movement journalism fellow with Scalawag Magazine, a former Lambda Literary Writer in Residence, and has received invitations to fellowships from Tin House, VONA, The Watering Hole and Kopkind. Their work has been featured in American Poetry Review, the Poem-a-Day series, Teen Vogue, and The Guardian. A genderqueer storyteller and community organizer, Aurielle writes about sex, bodies, systems, and The South from a Black Feminist lens.

Poetry Month Special: Aurielle Marie & Joy Priest