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Left Bank Books Presents: Aiden Heung
in conversation with poet Mary Jo Bang
April 1 @ 6:00 pm
This reading will be held in-person at Left Bank Books.
A Poetry Month Celebration! We are thrilled to partner with Left Bank Books to welcome Aiden Heung and Mary Jo Bang for a night of poetry celebrating the new release of All There Is to Lose by Aiden Heung. Heung holds an MFA in creative writing from Washington University. He is the 2024 winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the DISQUIET Prize, a winner of the International Proverse Poetry Prize, and the recipient of 2025 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss. Join us for a reading and book signing.
“What I love most in this book is how the images and details carry emotion via perspective, while lyrical in turn of phrase. Often understated, pared down, the poetry lives here in specifics that emote: A mother scrubs clean the headstone carvings, a man remembers laughing after he watched his father enter the river twenty years ago, travelers sleep with their heads on greasy bags. Each detail carries an undertow of emotion.” – Ilya Kaminsky, Judge of the 2024 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry
EVENT INFO
- Books available from Left Bank Books
- Curbside pick-up, in-store pick-up, and shipping available
- RSVP is encouraged
ABOUT THE BOOK
ALL THERE IS TO LOSE
Marking Aiden Heung’s debut collection, All There Is to Lose is the 2024 winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. The selecting judge, National Book Award Finalist Ilya Kaminsky, praises the resonant particularities and depth of feeling found in these poems, which convert “elegy [into] its driving force.” Poet and Critic Felicity Plunkett observes, “Dreams and memory move through these porous, venturesome poems. The spectral jostles with the sensual to tell ‘a story in which I could be found.’ Achily tender, they open to light, love and the jab of a joke.” Poet David Tait notes, “Unsettling and luminous, the poems preserve the memory of Village 915: its volatile seasons and hard-worn inhabitants, its headstones, spirits, and myriad forms of water. Here you’ll find not only poems of lyrical beauty, but of grim exactness.” The result is a stunning achievement of a first book, what Kaminsky identifies as an exemplar of “that ages-old mode of poetry wherein the poet uses language to break bread with the dead, to bring them back to life, if only for the moment, for a portion of the moment, an instant, before the line breaks.” Channeling the poet as medium, “I am the tension on the bow that draws the arrow,” Heung writes in “Epilogue.” “To lose myself — that is my destiny.”
ABOUT THE POETS
AIDEN HEUNG (he/they) is a Chinese poet born in a Tibetan Autonomous town. After working as a traveling salesman for years, he recently relocated to St. Louis, USA. His poems have been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, 声韵诗刊 (Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine), and many other places. He is a finalist for the DISQUIET Prize, a winner of the International Proverse Poetry Prize, and the recipient of 2025 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss. He and his work have been generously supported by Varuna, The National Writers’ House (Australia) and Swatch Art Peace Hotel residency (Switzerland/ Shanghai, China). He holds an MFA in creative writing from Washington University.
MARY JO BANG has published nine collections of poetry, including Elegy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and translations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio. She teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis.
PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
