William Wootten and Rebecca Kosick invite you to join them, in person, for a late launch of their recent poetry collections, both of which came out during the early days of the pandemic. These will be the first live readings from Wootten’s Looking at the Horseman and Kosick’s Labor Day in Bristol, and they would be delighted if you could come along to celebrate.

‌

The poems in William Wootten’s Looking at the Horsemen (New Walk) range across settings, subjects and eras: from Christ at the workbench, to rats on a plague ship, to life on a far planet. They may darkly reimagine fictional ideals – whether of shepherds or superheroes – or give elaborate shape to uncomfortable truths. Still, the poems’ most persistent preoccupation is time. They can look forward from the past, or back from the future, or simply catch the moment the season turns.

In Labor Day(Golias Books)—a long serial poem in fifty-six parts—Rebecca Kosick pursues a series of movements in and out of the natural and economic landscapes of the postindustrial Midwest at the turn of the twenty-first century. Held in counterpoise by disrupted cycles of care, riven efforts against forgetting, Labor Day becomes the genius loci it sets out to summon, constructing—not unambivalently—a sonic space to stand for those places that memory can’t reconstruct.