Third Place Books welcomes trifecta of poets Dan Alter, Paul Hlava Ceballos, and Jasmine Elizabeth Smith to our Seward Park store! Join us for readings from their books My Little Book of Exiles, banana [ ], and South Flight. This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required in advance.
Copies of My Little Book of Exiles, banana [ ], and South Flight will be available for purchase at the store. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
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The poems of My Little Book of Exiles sift through layers of diaspora and return, wrestling with the twin experiences of exile and separation. The diasporas of the collection take place in history, family, and the privacy of a mind as it navigates its daily work. In a set of "Labor Poems," Alter captures moments of working in the snow of Wisconsin, under floodlights on the Kenai bay of Alaska, or in the machine-roar of construction sites in the Bay Area, where he has worked for two decades as an electrician. Another set of poems confront the vision of the Jewish people's homecoming to their ancestral land. A philosopher of the "religion of labor"; and an assassinated Prime Minister are some of the figures which weave in with intimate histories of heartbreak and hope. Coming from a home where the Hebrew Bible was a book of bedtime stories, Alter's work is in conversation with texts as varied as the Hebrew Psalms, the poetry of John Keats and Ezra Pound and the songs of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley. The collection concludes with poems exploring the homeland of family made through marriage and fatherhood, the strains and moments of grace that come with them. What can withstand the pressures of distance, the forces from outside and inside that want to pull us apart? The book's strands weave a tapestry of hope even as the poems seek to discover finally what lasts.
The poems of My Little Book of Exiles sift through layers of diaspora and return, wrestling with the twin experiences of exile and separation. The diasporas of the collection take place in history, family, and the privacy of a mind as it navigates its daily work. In a set of "Labor Poems," Alter captures moments of working in the snow of Wisconsin, under floodlights on the Kenai bay of Alaska, or in the machine-roar of construction sites in the Bay Area, where he has worked for two decades as an electrician. Another set of poems confront the vision of the Jewish people's homecoming to their ancestral land. A philosopher of the "religion of labor"; and an assassinated Prime Minister are some of the figures which weave in with intimate histories of heartbreak and hope. Coming from a home where the Hebrew Bible was a book of bedtime stories, Alter's work is in conversation with texts as varied as the Hebrew Psalms, the poetry of John Keats and Ezra Pound and the songs of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley. The collection concludes with poems exploring the homeland of family made through marriage and fatherhood, the strains and moments of grace that come with them. What can withstand the pressures of distance, the forces from outside and inside that want to pull us apart? The book's strands weave a tapestry of hope even as the poems seek to discover finally what lasts.
The poems in Paul Hlava Ceballos’s debut collection banana [ ] reveal the extractive relationship the United States has with the Americas and its people through poetic portraits of migrants, family, and personal memories. At the heart of the book is a long poem that traces the history of bananas in Latin America using only found text from sources such as history books, declassified CIA documents, and commercials. The book includes collage, Ecuadorian decimas, a sonnet series in the voices of Incan royalty at the moment of colonization, and a long poem interspersed with photos and the author’s mother’s bilingual idioms. Traversing language and borders, history and story, traditional and invented forms, this book guides us beyond survival to love.
In her debut poetry collection, Jasmine Elizabeth Smith takes inspiration from Oklahoma Black history. In the wake of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, Jim Waters makes the difficult decision to leave behind his lover, Beatrice Vernadene Chapel, who as a Black woman must navigate the dangerous climate that produced the Jim Crow South and Red Summer. As Beatrice and Jim write letters to one another and hold imagined conversations with blues musicians Ida B. Cox, Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Ethel Waters, and the ghosts of Greenwood, the couple interrogates themes of blues epistemology, Black feminism, fraught attachments, and the way in which Black Americans have often changed their geographical regions with the hope of improving their conditions. The poetry collection South Flight is a eulogy, a blues, an unabashed love letter, and ragtime to the history of resistance, migration, and community in Black Oklahoma.
Dan Alter’s poems and reviews have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, Pank, and Zyzzyva; his first collection My Little Book of Exiles won the Poetry Prize for the 2022 Anne and Robert Cowan Writer’s Awards. He is a former fellow of the Arad Arts Project, and a member of the Community of Writers at Olympic Valley. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley and makes his living as an IBEW electrician. https://danalter.net/
Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the 2021 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, chosen by Ilya Kaminsky, forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Artist Trust, and the Poets House. His work has been published in Poetry Magazine, Pleiades, Triquarterly, Poetry Northwest, BOMB, Narrative Magazine, the LA Times, among other journals and newspapers, has been translated to the Ukrainian, and nominated for the Pushcart. He lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography. (https://www.
Jasmine Elizabeth Smith’s poetic work is invested in the Diaspora of Black Americans in various historical contexts and eras. Her work has been featured in Black Renaissance Noir, POETRY, and LA Review of Books, and Kweli among others. Her debut collection South Flight was a finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and is the winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize. Smith works as an associate guest editor for the Black Earth Institute’s /About Place Journal/ and serves on the 25th Anniversary Cave Canem Fellows and Faculty Committee while teaching a variety of English courses in her recent home of South Seattle. www.jasmineelizabethsmith.com/
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![banana [ ] (Pitt Poetry Series) By Paul Hlava Ceballos Cover Image](https://images.booksense.com/images/books/937/966/FC9780822966937.JPG)
