(Live and In person) SHOP EVENTS STAFF PICKS ABOUT US MY ACCOUNT CONTACT Claire Schwartz, Gabrielle Bates, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

A Seattle visit and a remarkable new debut by New York-based poet Claire Schwartz helps occasion what would be an excellent evening of work here as she is joined by esteemed Seattle poets Gabrielle Bates and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Claire Schwartz,  who is poetry editor of Jewish Currents, has a compelling first book out from Graywolf, Civil Service.

“The power of this book is in its uncontrollable private will to imagine against the public failure of imagination. The poet dismembers our political reality into the double-edged lines, into the bare and ashamed symbols and silences. Brutal and coy, Claire Schwartz creates a scream out of irony and a rhythm out of the four corners of the page.”—Valzhyna Mort.

“We’ve all heard the cliché ‘poems are bombs.’ But Claire Schwartz’s incendiaries whisper hard truths and harder questions, beckoning us closer, seeping gently into our consciousness before exploding the passive and placid thinking that allow us to go about our ‘normal’ lives. Civil Service shines a bright light onto a dark world ruled by property, prisons, patriarchy, and profit.”—Robin D. G. Kelley.

Gabrielle Bates has her debut poetry collection, Judas Goat coming from Tin House Books in 2023, works at Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is most recently the Washington State Book Award winner of Water & Salt (Red Hen Press) and Arab in Newsland, winner of the Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize.

This reading has now been moved to our friends and colleagues at Open Books: A Poem Emporium.