Annie Bloom’s welcomes Portland writers Jessica E. Johnson and Kesha Ajose-Fisher for readings and conversation. Jessica E. Johnson’s new poetry collection is Metabolics. Kesha Ajose-Fisher’s short story collection, No God Like the Mother, is newly reissued by Portland’s own Forest Avenue Press.
Signed and personalized copies of both authors’ books are available for order! Please, please, please include the name for personalization in the order notes; all orders without a name specified in the order notes will be signed only.
About Metabolics:
In this debut poetry collection, a single speaker tries to control her body and negotiate her time with digital devices, all the while navigating identities, impulses, and relationships that are often in tension.
Metabolics, a book-length poem, borrows the movements of metabolic pathways to consider how nature accomplishes both balance and deep transformation. In visual figures and prose blocks that bridge the divide between poetry and nonfiction, Jessica E. Johnson employs scientific idioms to construct an allegory about a family in the Pacific Northwest. The region becomes a character in its own right, with cedars, moss, and heavy cloud knitting the mother, father, boy, and girl into their setting.
Jessica E. Johnson writes poetry, nonfiction, and things in between. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, and Tin House, among others. Her chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other was an Oregon Book Award finalist. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
About No God Like the Mother:
Winner of the Oregon Book Award for Fiction, No God Like the Mother follows characters in transition, through tribulation and hope. Set around the world–the bustling streets of Lagos, the arid gardens beside the Red Sea, an apartment in Paris, and the rain-washed suburbs of the Pacific Northwest–this collection of nine stories is a masterful exploration of life’s uncertainty.
Kesha Ajose-Fisher was born in Chicago, raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and returned to the United States with her family in the early nineties. She won the 2020 Ken Kesey Prize through the Oregon Book Awards for her debut collection: No God Like the Mother. She is also an Oregon Literary Fellow and a relentless student of the human condition. Ajose-Fisher’s work has appeared in collections such as The Alchemy, The Phoenix, The Buckman Journal, and was recently anthologized in Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin.
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