Virtual Event: Tamiko Beyer

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes acclaimed poet and activist TAMIKO BEYER for an evening of readings and discussion celebrating the release of her latest poetry collection, Last Days. She will be joined by celebrated performance artist, poet, and educator GABRIELLE CIVIL.

Contribute to Support Harvard Book Store

While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $5 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 Last Days on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About Last Days

Last Days is a practice of radical imagination for our current political and environmental crises. It excavates the conditions that have brought us here—white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, corporate power, capitalism—and calls ancestors, birds, organizers, and lovers to conjure a new world. It explores how to transform our future to be more beautiful, more just, and more compassionate than we can imagine.

Praise for Last Days

"At this moment in history, a singular question often arises: what happens to the self and to the group when a keen part of ourself is the Other? Tamiko Beyer allows the question to be complex because, for her, even being human has its Otherness. In the phrase 'slip // of boundaries' ('Estuaries'), we are introduced early in the collection to a staff that may assist in climbing into and along with these gorgeous poems, some of which 'slip' form from Western open verse to authentically realized haiku and haibun. The slip is also identity from mixed race to queer to class to human; the slip is language as well as poetics—especially for those in Japanese forms; and it is that abiding psychological Freudian slip. (And perhaps, a female garment, given Beyer's playfulness!) And, then there is location, whether subterranean or alternate. Enter into this collection of Last Days and enjoy powerful discoveries in her crossings and lines." —Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies