What solitary night walks and “one-minute friends” could unleash a new poetry of the senses? When the DJ could not save your life that night, what downpour stopped you dead as you could not escape old heartbreak to reach new catharsis—and what might compel you to say that you’d change nothing and do it all over again? In this generative, seven-week online workshop, we’ll explore the joys and sorrows of reckless decisions and sunrise rebellions that led us wonderfully astray, far from “true” love and common sense. We’ll recenter the narrative of “the love story” in favor of staking our words on the best worst decisions of relationships and near-misses. We’ll read work from poets such as Carl Phillips, Esperanza Hope Snyder, Adrienne Su, Natalie Diaz, Caroline Bird and more. Class sessions will meet synchronously via Zoom every Tuesday, and assignments, poems and critiques will be shared via Wet Ink.
Workshop Details
Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery (2021) and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019). Her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets, which appears in Black Warrior Review (2020), is part of a larger future project called The Atomic Sonnets, which she began in 2019 in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. She is a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow and the recipient of a 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry. Her work appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Tin House, Guernica and TriQuarterly, among others. In 2017, her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC and published by Kenyon Review online. Recently, her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was featured on Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. She writes for the Kenyon Review blog.