Thurs 2 May
6:30-9pm
Grief's Alphabet tells the story of Etter's relationship with her (adoptive) mother and her unexpected death. Forward Prize winner Caroline Bird writes, 'When reading about grief, the reader often feels a paradoxical consolation, sensing that the writing process has enacted, or begun to, a healing one, meaning we rarely experience unprocessed grief in a poem. Carrie Etter gives us that rare experience. Using the anti-language of poetry – its white space, its obfuscations, time-jumps, lucid yet unexplained details – Etter performs a painfully remarkable magic trick: she gives a voice to ‘soundless keening,’ the grief that cannot speak.'
With additional readings by Inua Ellams, Mary Jean Chan and Julia Copus.
American expatriate Carrie Etter has lived in England since 2001 and is a member of the creative writing faculty of the University of Bristol. She has published four previous collections, including The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and The Weather in Normal (Seren, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals and anthologies internationally. She also writes short fiction, essays, and reviews.