Virtual Event: Megan Alpert and José Angel Araguz

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes poets MEGAN ALPERT and JOSÉ ANGEL ARAGUZ for a discussion of their poetry collections The Animal at Your Side and An Empty Pot's Darkness.

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While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $3 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by purchasing a copy of An Empty Pot's Darkness and The Animal at Your Side on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About The Animal at Your Side

The narrators in The Animal at Your Side scavenge for clues, trying to stitch together a life in the midst of unrootedness. Finding bones, talismans, and half-heard voices that portal back to both personal and collective history, the speakers are haunted by diaspora, family estrangement, intergenerational trauma, and resilience. What are the costs of being far away from a homeplace? What are the costs of returning? And when the costs are too high on both sides, how do you choose? Grieving the loss of family of origin, and longing to return, the narrators forge new shapes, grounded in a connection to the natural world, ultimately making a home in their own unsettled natures.

These poems play with form and structure, ranging from tightly-wound lyrics to detailed reportage. Alpert uses white space and invents forms as needed, creating sunken stanzas and a poem shaped like a rib cage. By turns gritty, frank, and devotional, The Animal at Your Side finds things to be treasured in weirdness, queerness, the ecstatic, and the erotic. It is a book for anyone who has ever been lost, who has waited for what seemed like too long "for the voices/to filter back."

About An Empty Pot's Darkness

José Angel Araguz’s fourth full-length poetry collection takes readers through a series of poetic sequences that engage with ideas of life, love, death, and friendship. Whether holding elegiac conversations with writers known personally or known only through reading; braiding the folklore of La Llorona with the narrative of a past relationship; or exploring concepts of mortality, these poems explore the nuances and depths of life eight lines at a time.

Praise for The Animal at Your Side

"How does one survive the loss of a sister, the loss of everyone in the family besides the animals? Megan Alpert’s gorgeous new collection, The Animal at Your Side, is at once surreal and filled with the flora and fauna of a strangling world, where the speaker takes us with her along a path lined with feathers and bones. With an unnamed war in the background, ancestors waiting in the trees, everyone gone, everyone dead, we must find comfort in what still moves, even when it could be dangerous . . . These poems “unhome” and unhinge, and I am enchanted with this haunting." —Jenn Givhan, author of Rosa’s Einstein and Girl with Death Mask

"The Animal at Your Side spans worlds—Eastern Europe, China, Ecuador, folktale and myth—all of these worlds equally sinister and haunting. In poems where we feel "the whirr-click of war beginning..." the poet learns that the best way to survive is to become "the same color as rocks, water,/anything I walked past,/see-through". This is Megan Alpert's gift to us—radical empathy—so we can shape-shift through these worlds as she has. This is a collection I'll read time and again, and I know I will grow with each reading." —Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask

Praise for An Empty Pot's Darkness

"Araguz is masterful in his command of language, creating both astonishing beauty and devastation with the lightest gestures. In strikingly elegant octaves, he points to the revolution of time, of existence itself—our vulnerability to erasure, dissipation, then rebirth. This work, too, is a cycle: an eternal conversation between writer and tradition, poet and reader, ink and paper. Words take on new forms each time they return, clothing themselves as ash, prayer, alms, and gold." —Adeeba Shahid Talukder, author of Shahr-e-jaanaan: City of the Beloved

"The poetry in, An Empty Pot's Darkness, brings stunning moments of beauty to notions of what if, death, the moon, and lost relationships. Rooms we enter can hold crushing memories. Love and the laughter of a food fight can be traced by the sorrow of dust. Araguz's octaves bring out the grey gloom we hold in our core as we live through bittersweet and mystical journeys. Araguz's poetry gives the reader an epic story in few lines." —Vincent Cooper, author of Zarzamora: Poetry of Survival 

"These eight-line poems are deftly woven tapestries in which light and dark are not opposites but gradients. Likewise wistfulness and passion, playfulness and melancholy, invocation and isolation. Likewise what it means to be dying, and to be alive. These poems and the silences within them kept me turning the pages  – and turning back to read again." —Laura M. Kaminski, author of The Heretic's Hymnal: 99 New and Selected Poems