Hybrid Event: Book of Potions, Lauren K. Watel

East City Bookshop welcomes Lauren K Watel to discuss her work, Book of Potions, in conversation with E. Hughes and E. Ethelbert Miller.

Note on Format: This hybrid event will have both an in-person component with limited seating as well as a virtual broadcast via Zoom Webinar. Both in-person and virtual attendees will be able to pose questions to the author during audience Q&A.

ABOUT BOOK OF POTIONS

Winner of the 2023 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.

Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions captures a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.

By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.

Lauren K. Watel’s debut book, a collection of prose poetry entitled BOOK of POTIONS (potion = poem + fiction), was awarded the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky, and came out in February from Sarabande Books. Her poetry, fiction, essays and translations have appeared widely. A native of Dallas, TX, she lives in Decatur, GA. https://www.laurenkwatel.com

E. Hughes is the author of Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water (Haymarket Books 2024). They received their MFA in poetry and MA in English Literature from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast Magazine, Colorado Review, and The Rumpus—among others. They are a Cave Canem fellow and have been a finalist for the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, and a semifinalist of the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest. Currently, Hughes is a PhD student in Philosophy at Emory University studying black aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism.

Eugene Ethelbert Miller (born November 20, 1950) is an African-American poet, teacher and literary activist, based in Washington, DC. He is the author of several collections of poetry and two memoirs, the editor of Poet Lore magazine, and the host of the weekly WPFW morning radio show On the Margin.