George Abraham, Marwa Helal, Brandon Melendez, and Margaret Rhee

Harvard Book Store welcomes local poets GEORGE ABRAHAM, MARWA HELAL, BRANDON MELENDEZ, and MARGARET RHEE for a discussion of their poetry collections the specimen's apology, Invasive species, Gold That Frames the Mirror, and Love, Robot. They will be introduced by ANDRÉ M. CARRINGTON. 

About the specimen's apology

"From the first, devastating poem ("i touch myself & do not leak gold"), George Abraham's poems bristle with alchemy, a narrative of love, history, family, and Palestine that pulses with longing. Juxtaposed with Leila Abdelrazaq's startlingly evocative artwork, this book is a fearless, riveting excavation of self and other." —Hala Alyan

"Searing away binaries, demolishing the calcified partitions between halves—this is George Abraham's the specimen's apology. Boy/man, man/woman, history/present, conflict/occupation, English/Arabic, poetry/visual art—the gulf between each is breached, shrunk, erased, widened, warped. 'I am always translating,' Abraham tells us in one poem—and it is the wild desperate yearning of the translator, working in vain to achieve perfect fidelity to a source, that powers these poems: 'if desire is, / as my language translates, a moon, / let this body be the satellite.'" —Kaveh Akbar

About Invasive species

"Marwa’s poems energize through their daring intelligence, their subversion of scripts. This extraordinary work never lets us rest in complacent reading; they teach us how to read them by refusing language’s imperialistic nature through swerves, reversals, code-switching, code formation, and formal innovations. An electrifying, wildly inventive work.” —Jenny Xie

In Invasive species, Marwa Helal’s searing politically charged poems touch on our collective humanity and build new pathways for empathy, etching themselves into memory. This work centers on urgent themes in our cultural landscape, creating space for unseen victims of discriminatory foreign (read: immigration) policy: migrants, refugees―the displaced. Helal transfers lived experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders through language.

About Gold That Frames the Mirror

"Gold That Frames the Mirror is a sacred surprise. . . . The book is both breath-taking and breath-giving, the way each poem allows the reader to relish in what we didn't know we needed." ―Porsha Olayiwola, Poet Laureate of Boston

Orbiting a daisy-chain of fascinations that range from heritage & family to grief, music, & mental illness, these poems want to know what “home” means, even when the answers can seem too blood-bright to bear staring at. Yet do not mistake Melendez for a poet of an uncomplicated sadness: even when he writes of deep loss, there is the possibility of wonder & joy. Drawing from a wellspring of profound bewilderment present in his images as well as how language assumes―or is assumed by―form, Melendez knows poetry, like home, is something we carry with us in our bodies. Every certainty and every wonderment in Gold That Frames the Mirror is come by honestly and with Melendez’s unwavering & tender scrutiny. Here is a book haunted by history but never in service of it. Here is a book that wants to know what comes after elegy, when the gods slink back into their heavens, when we are only left with the names of our dead & the good, dark earth. Melendez offers something like a prayer against overlooking the past & to remember where the gold came from. After all, “Anywhere can become you / once you forget / how you got there."

About Love, Robot

"The poems of Love, Robot are delicate and smooth, witty and touching, and yes, occasionally odd and strange, as human beings themselves are. In a paradoxical and wonderful way, Margaret Rhee's robot love affairs make us rethink what it might mean to be human." —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

Poetry. Technology. Media Studies. A collection of love poetry that undercuts and reassembles narratives, Love, Robot is an experimental text that humanizes our relationship with technology. Through liaisons between humans and machines in a science fictional world, the collection offers a tense, playful, yet complex portrait of love, reflective of our contemporary moment. Rhee draws from a wide array of forms from poetics and robotics such as algorithms, narrative poetry, chat scripts, and failed sonnets to create a world of transgressive love. This vision of an artificially intelligent future reveals and questions the contours of the human, and how robots and humans fall in and out of love.