Walter Holland celebrates his new book of poems “Reconstruction” from Finishing Line Press and Jaime Manrique will read from his two previous collections “My Night with Federico Garcia Lorca” and “Tarzan/ My Body/ Christopher Columbus,” as well as his uncollected poems. Christopher Bram will moderate a brief conversation with Holland and Manrique about their gay boyhoods, their cultural experiences and their eventual moves to New York City. Both poets share in a complexity of romance and nostalgia for societies which ultimately they were drawn to leave, and both have addressed the brightness and shadow of their memories and the problematic in the lyric imagination.

“Reconstruction” is a work for our American present. It speaks to the present conflicts over race and privilege. It is a work of complicated poetic reconciliation. Weaving both vivid lyric language into short narrative poems, Holland reconstructs a flawed yet nostalgic past. Uprooted northerners, Holland, his sisters, and his parents sought the bucolic charm and unfettered economic opportunity of 1950s Virginia. Middle-class and affluent, Holland went to ballroom lessons, piano lessons, lived in a home attended to by a maid, and grew into a society, on the one hand as an outsider—northern born, Catholic, liberally inclined, studying modern dance and performing in community theater—and on the other felt obliged upon to take a date to her debutante party, attend the cotillions, hunt on one occasion, and obediently comply with the rules of segregation.

Walter Holland is the author of four books of poetry: “Reconstruction,” “Circuit,” “Transatlantic,” and “A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992,” as well as a novel, “The March.” Some of his poetry credits include: “Antioch Review,” “Art and Understanding,” and “Barrow Street,” as well as many anthologies. He previously taught American Poetry part-time at the New School for ten years before retiring. He has reviewed books, written a libretto, had his short fiction and scholarly articles published in many journals and holds a PhD in English from CUNY Graduate Center. He lives in New York City. For more information visit walterhollandwriter.com.

Jaime Manrique is a celebrated novelist, essayist, and poet. Some of his critically acclaimed novels include “Latin Moon in Manhattan,” “Twilight at the Equator,” “Cervantes Street,” “Our Lives Are the Rivers,” and “Like This Afternoon Forever.” His much-praised non-fiction book “Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me,” won him a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poetry books include “Scarecrow,” “My Night with Federico Garcia Lorca” and “Tarzan/My Body/Christoper Columbus.” John Ashbery writes of Manrique’s 1995 “My Night with Federico García Lorca”: “Memories of an ecstatic childhood—walks by the sea, ‘a happy mambo,’ eating deceptive tropical fruits—merge with those of recent loves in these luscious, incantatory poems.”

Christopher Bram is the author of nine novels, including the book that became the movie “Gods and Monsters.” He also wrote “Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America.” He teaches at the Gallatin School of New York University.