Poetry Reading with Elise Paschen & Sophie Cabot Black

About Blood Wolf Moon

In this riveting sixth poetry collection, Paschen explores the story lines of her Osage heritage. The core of the book grapples with a dark period of American history, “The Reign of Terror,” when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Paschen searches her cultural past and family history in poems about the land, ancestors, childhood, loss, nature, transformation, flight and language. In this cinematic book, she builds drama in overlapping narratives, reinventing ways to approach the line on the page. Described by poet Timothy Donnelly as “one of today’s most formally astute poets,” Paschen opens Blood Wolf Moon with the long poem, “Heritage,” a bracelet of crown poems, then shifts registers to formal poems and prose sequences. Poet and editor Ester Belin calls the concluding poems with their use of Osage language, “significant leaps into literary sovereignty.” Blood Wolf Moon captivates with its emotional intensity and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity. It’s a book you can’t put down.

About Geometry of the Restless Herd

In Geometry of the Restless Herd, Sophie Cabot Black stages a powerful allegory for the social and political realities of our human world. Through hauntingly metaphysical poems set within a sheepherder’s domain, Black conjures fields of harvest and resurrection, of wagers and outcomes—animals to keep, and those destined for slaughter. Here, both singular voices and polyvocal choruses argue through discourse, asking who has the real power, and how are we to survive the violence we do to each other? Black’s scenes are at once oneiric and raw: a squeaking gate wails against neglect; a field receives a runt body; a raccoon flees with egg dripping from its mouth—all while lush rains and long winters quiet the dead. Navigating both confining pens and wide-open spaces, these poems ask startlingly immediate questions about captivity and freedom, protection and exploitation, confronting the predicaments of late capitalism: industries of infinite regress, technologies that exceed us, and a soul stranded somewhere between expectation and redemption. Ultimately, these stark pastorals paint a moving portrait of life: as utterly inseparable from the world it inhabits.

Elise Paschen, an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, is the author of Tallchief, The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds MPhil and DPhil degrees from Oxford University. Her poems have been published widely, including in Poetry magazine, the New Yorker, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and The Best American Poetry. She is the editor of The Eloquent Poem and has edited or coedited numerous other anthologies, including the New York Times bestseller, Poetry Speaks. A cofounder of Poetry in Motion, Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sophie Cabot Black has three poetry collections from Graywolf Press: The Misunderstanding of Nature, which received the Poetry Society of America’s First Book Award; The Descent, which received the 2005 Connecticut Book Award; and most recently, The Exchange. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.