Too Good To Miss: Extraordinary Poets with Wisconsin Ties

media release: Join the Wisconsin Book Festival for an evening of moving poetry by extraordinary poets with Wisconsin Ties: Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Alison Thumel, and J.L. Conrad.

Hoffman's Exploding Head is a memoir in prose poems about the author’s lifelong journey with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). But the diagnosis is not named in the poems themselves; instead, the poet plunges readers directly into the vivid, visceral experience of obsession and compulsion, emphasizing struggles that some readers may not immediately recognize as symptoms of OCD (car accidents, knives, a terrifying angel figure, counting and drawing patterns on windows, etc.), but for those with the disorder, or those with loved ones living with OCD, they will feel all too familiar. 

In the debut collection Architect, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths.

With their time machines, piñatas, medications, zebras, unsettlement, and imagined lives, these poems in Conrad's The World in Which explore some of the deep strangeness—and beauty provoked by the appearance of the incongruous—that Conrad perceives in the world(s) around and beyond us.

Hosted by Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Program Coordinator Sean Bishop.