Visiting Writers Series Thursday: José Felipe Alvergue and Lewis Freedman

The Visiting Writers Series welcomes José Felipe Alvergue and Lewis Freedman to Carthage on Thursday, March 30, for a reading at 5 p.m. in Niemann Media Theater. Also, from 12:30 to 2:10 p.m. in Lentz Hall 220, Lewis Freedman will give a talk and lead a discussion on poet Jack Spicer and, as Lewis describes it, “the question of how we disappear into su José Felipe Alverguerfaces in writing and how we conduct the outside in that disappearance.”

All are welcome at both events.

José Felipe Alvergue and Lewis Freedman are two exciting young poets who share the sincere relation to innovation that produces provocative and deeply meaningful writing. Both poets have new books.

Alvergue’s precis (Omnidawn, 2017) explores the policed realm of the border through its histories, narratives, poetries. It is an essential book for this moment.

Freedman’s Residual Synonyms for the Name of God (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016) takes as a starting point a book by his grandfather, Rabbinical Synonyms for the Name of God, which focused on the first centuries of the Common Era. Then, Ian Dreiblatt writes in Music and Literature, “faced with the instability of self wrought by our crisis of infinite screens, Synonyms offers to replace it not with stability, but with a different instability, a holy one.” 

Lewis FreedmanPlease join us to hear these two wonderful living writers.

Freedman lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In addition to Residual Synonyms for the Name of God, he is the author of Hold the Blue Orb, Baby (Well Greased, 2013). 

Alvergue is a graduate of both the Cal Arts Writing and Buffalo Poetics programs. He is the author of gist : rift : drift : bloom (2015) and precis (2017), and teaches contemporary literature and transnationalism at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.