The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium is delighted to announce our Fall quarter Futures of Poetics event featuring our very own Isaac Ginsberg Miller on Monday, December 2nd, 2019 @ 12:30 pm in the Hagstrum Room (201 University Hall).

We will be discussing Isaac’s newly released chapbook Stopgap (winner of the 2018 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest), which he will read from, followed by a conversation. We have a limited number of copies of his book on a first-come, first-served basis. Please RSVP to Isaac’s email: isaacmiller2022@u.northwestern.edu to reserve a copy (once the physical copies are reserved a .pdf version will be made available). See below for a brief description of the book.

Lunch will be served, and Poetry & Poetics will hold an end-of-quarter reception after the workshop (also in the Hagstrum Room). We hope you will be able to attend!

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Stopgap reckons with the myth of progress: all the temporary measures enacted in the name of a promised future that never arrives. The gap in which we live. This thematic thread is braided across multiple registers: personal-familial, societal-political, and spiritual-mythological. In this collection, deities exercise tremendous power over human beings, precisely because these gods are human-made, like the gods of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, nationalism, and war. Another word for this is theodicy: why does God allow evil to exist in the world? Or, why is human culpability projected beyond human control? Ultimately, Stopgap is a meditation on uncertainty, on not knowing the answers. The poems in this chapbook insist that failure forces us to realize our inability to predict the future, and reminds us that ultimately we do not know—for bad or good—what will happen next.