A queer grief reading and launch for "Say It Hurts" by Lisa Summe with Sara Watson, Jari Bradley, Micaela Corn, and Diannely Antigua
About this Event
We're so excited to host the launch of local poet Lisa Summe's first full-length collection, out now from YesYes Books: Say It Hurts. Lisa will be joined by writers Sara Watson, Jari Bradley, Micaela Corn, and Diannely Antigua for a reading centered on themes surrounding queer grief. There'll be time for an audience Q&A at the end.
Copies of Say It Hurts will be available here on our ready-to-ship website, which also has a wide selection of recommended and best-selling books, store merch, book subscription boxes, and more. You can request specific books you don't see on the site through this form, too. All orders ship from our store in Pittsburgh.
Diannely's book Ugly Music is available on our Bookshop.org list for recent and upcoming events. Check out our curated lists and picks onour main Bookshop.org affiliate page, or use the search bar in the upper center-right to look for any book. (Using the book's ISBN usually works best.)
This event will be hosted on Zoom. You'll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 1/23. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.
Praise for Say It Hurts:
In Say It Hurts, Summe shows us what it can feel like to come home and come out again and again in the Midwest, home where a father can be “both nest & hawk,” home where a ten-year-old girl draws her dream wedding to a girl on a sheet of graph paper in math class, home where her body stands “steady like a home,” home where she misses the girl she loved and where she swims in the Allegheny River, home where the poem is the place and the girl she loved is there, too. —Julia Koets, Pine
Alive with moats of pink catfish, and gardens of boomerangs, Lisa Summe’s debut collection, Say It Hurts, draws us what we need most: new shapes of loss, new contours of love. And because we need it, Summe paints a vibrant queerness onto buzz cuts, backseats, and sleepovers. Forthright and declarative, Summe writes, in the book’s opening poem, “When a lesbian / writes a poem / it’s a lesbian poem.” What a queer wonder, to play light as a feather, stiff as a board. What a queer wonder to be both alive and capable of love, in a world that prefers we be neither. Summe writes, “see how I tried not to write a love poem but here it comes,” and it does come, and we love it. —Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Water I Won’t Touch
Summe's Say It Hurts is a manual for growing up that grown-ups still need. It's both a diary entry and a to-do list, a confessional and a set of instructions. To come of age as a queer person often means spending years trying to find the secret room where you most belong; Summe has taken that room and bulldozed the walls. This book has the answers that, for so long, felt like secrets. —Olivia Gatwood, Life of the Party
About the writers:
Lisa Summe is the author of Say It Hurts. She earned a BA and MA in literature at the University of Cincinnati, and an MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bat City Review, The Cincinnati Review, Muzzle, Waxwing, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. You can find her running, playing baseball, or eating vegan pastries in Pittsburgh, PA and on Instagram and Twitter @lisasumme.
Sara Watson is a feminist writer and educator whose work appears inBOAAT, PANK, and The Southern Review. She lives in Pittsburgh with two little dogs.
Jari Bradley is a Black genderqueer poet and scholar from San Francisco, California. They have received fellowships and support from Callaloo, Cave Canem, Tin House, The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments. Jari’s work has been published in The Adroit Journal, The Offing, Academy of American Poets, Callaloo, Columbia Journal, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Jari Bradley (MFA, University of Pittsburgh) is the current 2020–2021 First Wave Poetry Fellow at UW–Madison.
Micaela Corn is allergic to peanuts, hazelnuts, horses, and her beloved cat. She can eat milk only if it’s cooked, but butter is fine. (Don’t give her any protein shakes with whey powder; she’ll be too strong.) She has only experienced anaphylaxis once, as a six-month-old baby. One time when she was a little older, she swallowed a penny. She lives in Pittsburgh and sometimes writes poems.
Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship; and received her MFA at NYU where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.