Monk Books is proud to present the launch event for Lonely Christopher’s debut poetry collection, Death & Disaster Series. Join Lonely Christopher, Uche Nduka, and Ariana Reines for a poetry reading at the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, with revelrous partying to follow!

YOUR READERS:

Uche Nduka was born in Umuahia, Nigeria. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of Nigeria. His volumes of poetry include Flower Child (1988), Second Act (1994), The Bremen Poems (1995), Chiaroscuro(1007), for which he was awarded the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize, If Only the Night (2002),Heart’s Field (2005), Eel on Reef (2007), Tracer (2010), Ijele (2012), and Nine East (2013). His work has been translated into German, Serbo Croatian, Romanian, Spanish, and Dutch. He is a member of the Association of Nigerian Authors and American PEN. He lived in Germany and Holland for over a decade and was the recipient of a Goethe Institut Fellowship and Heinrich Böll Haus Guest Author Fellowship. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

Ariana Reines is author of The Cow (2006), winner of the Alberta Prize from Fence Books, Coeur de Lion(2007), and Mercury (2011). Her play Telephone was produced at the Cherry Lane Theater and won several Obie awards. Her translations include a version of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (2009); Jean-Luc Hennig’s The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore (2009); and Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the Young-Girl (2012). Reines was 2009 Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California Berkeley; she has taught master classes at Pomona College, the University of California Davis, and the University of Pittsburgh.

Lonely Christopher is a poet and filmmaker. He is the author of the poetry collection Death & Disaster Series(Monk Books, 2014) and the short story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, which was a 2011 selection of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery imprint of Akashic Books. His plays have been produced in New York City and China. He wrote and directed the feature film MOM (Cavazos Films, 2013) and his stories have been adapted for the screen in Canada and France. He lives in Brooklyn.

THE BOOK:

Lonely Christopher’s debut poetry collection is a sprawling and melancholic confrontation of death in the context of late capitalism. The poet writes through the premature end of his mother’s life and the aftermath, investigating and raging against tragedy and loss. Infused with grief, sorrow, and anger, the series is a raw and deeply personal reckoning with the romantic and profoundly dark themes that crawl under the surface of quotidian awareness, waiting to bleed forth in the wake of death and disaster. Arch and penetrating, these poems collapse attraction and repulsion, joy and misery, origination and destruction—ultimately portraying some of the most underlit elements of our human experience with imaginative clarity.

“Aesthetically and polemically these poems heft joy and grief and fury. Politics, romance, wonder suffuse them. Lonely Christopher is a fearless poet par excellence. ‘I am the star of my own truncated privacy’ says the poet. What choice do we have but to heed his appeal: ‘Do not face eternity with your brain.'” – Uche Nduka (author ofIjele and Nine East)

“OH GOD, I’ve started this blurb so many times! HOW TO SAY HOW essential this writer Lonely Christopher is for our lives!? It’s all between the words, this pressure he builds behind the eyes. Stand anywhere you want with this book inside our headache age of information fatigue, ‘anything in the orange light / of my word for you / anything / to excuse / all the pain.’ DON’T BE STUPID you know as well as I do these poems boil to the top of the gravy!!” – CAConrad (author of The Book of Frank and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon)

“‘I/ don’t belong in America I belong/ in love,’ says this provocative poet, but it’s not true: at the same time minimal and raw, smart-set knowing and uninhibited weird, Lonely Christopher belongs anywhere that his poetry can be read. He knows too much and wants to reveal it all (fans of Ariana Reines, or of Eileen Myles, take note). The lines get rough and bloody, rehearsing and repurposing queer revolutions. This book lays bare secrets of our time, halfway between the compression of (say) Robert Creeley and the unmade bed at 3am, from which he looks out the window at (variously) the blank walls that model his free verse, the window of the day before, and the fire across the ledge, the one he almost ‘started/ as a conduit for my love/ and rage.'” – Stephen Burt (author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry)