Jess L Parker
Old Sugar Distillery 931 E. Main St., Madison, Wisconsin 53703
Kate Longley/Eloise and Peas
Jess L. Parker
Star Things, the Dynamo Verlag Book Prize-winning poetry collection by Jess L Parker, will be celebrated at this book launch event. Star Things is the UW-Madison alumna’s first published poetry collection. “Through Parker’s lyrical transmutation of the ordinary into the sublime, we find ourselves at home among the stars,” writes poet Josh Norman in the book’s jacket copy. The launch will include readings by Parker and poet Cynthia Marie Hoffmann, music by Mark Croft, appetizers and a cash bar.
media release: Star Things Book Launch Party and book signing at Old Sugar Distillery:
Music by Mark Croft Duo — Roots
Poetry Readings by Jess L Parker and
Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Appetizers will be served and cash bar available. Open to the public!
“The celestial horizons of Jess Parker’s Star Things reveal a poet with a rare gift to leap between the cosmic and the quotidian. In the precise clarity of these poems, Parker’s acute eye and clever comedy follow unexpected wormholes that unsettle ordinary moments as they jump between scales, finding rejected fruit in a disappointing moon as readily as she finds the complexities of time in a stack of pancakes.” - Stephen J. Burn, University of Glasgow, author of Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism
“With the varying intensity of a telescope or a microscope or the inner eye of memory, Jess L Parker zooms in and out on the negative spaces that exist between the esoteric, the mundane, and the emotional life that binds them. Each poem is ‘a new datum, to be loved/as intricately as Saturn’s rings are particular/up close, and held as tightly as they are.’ In the dusty moonscapes of Star Things, every love, every scraped knee, every abandonment, every moon is at once familiar yet alien. Through Parker’s lyrical transmutation of the ordinary into the sublime, we find ourselves at home among the stars.” - Josh Burt Norman, author of Telescopes and Other People