MoBot & SLPC Present: Kristin Emanuel & Amie Whittemore
a collaboration with Missouri Botanical Garden
June 10 @ 7:00 pm
Join Missouri Botanical Garden and Saint Louis Poetry Center in celebrating the launch of the debut poetry collection by Kristin Emanuel, who will be reading with Amie Whittemore. Copies of Birdwatching in the 4th Dimension and Nest of Matches will be available for purchase from the poets. All proceeds from Kristin’s book sales will benefit STAR – St. Louis Avian Rescue.
After the poetry reading, guests are invited to tour Missouri Botanical Garden’s Peter H. Raven Library & Archives at the Bayer Center research institute.
RSVP is encouraged but not required.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
Birdwatching in the 4th Dimension
With percussive alacrity Birdwatching in the 4th Dimension attunes us to the precarity and blinding wonder of life in ages past and present. Joy and mourning mingle in these startling poems, mapped onto the fossil record and the humdrum calamities of the Anthropocene. In Emanuel’s poems, the beat of a heard it enough to conjure crustaceans and crocuses, megatheriea and mantises; it is enough to make them dance in the cosmic matrix of evolution, death, and rebirth.
Nest of Matches
Nest of Matches is a lavish declaration of the beauty of the natural world, queer identity, and of the imagination set free. Whittemore’s third collection explores the complexities of love—romantic, familial, and love for place—and wonders at cycles of life, finding that: “Every habit / even love—strangest / of them all—offers exhaustion / and renewal.” Moving seamlessly from meditations on the moon’s phases to explorations of dream spaces to searches for meaning through patterns of love and loss, Whittemore’s work embodies the mysteries of dichotomies—grief and joy, consciousness and unconsciousness, habit and spontaneity—and how they coexist to create our identities. Throughout the collection, Whittemore reveals how interior nature manifests into exterior habits and how physical landscapes shape the psyche.
ABOUT STAR-ST. LOUIS AVIAN RESCUE
STAR’s mission is to improve and enrich the lives of parrots through rescue, rehabilitative fostering, adoption and education. STAR is a foster-based organization. Birds who enter their adoption program are placed in foster homes, with the eventual goal of placement in forever homes.
To learn more, visit: https://staravian.org/
ABOUT THE POETS
KRISTIN EMANUEL holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Kansas where she studied eco-fabulism and the comics poetry movement. Her latest poems, comics, and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Ecotone, and Blackbird, with new work forthcoming in Poetry Northwest and Sugar House Review. You can find a list of her selected publications at: https://kristinemanuel.com/.
AMIE WHITTEMORE (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared in Blackbird, Colorado Review, Terrain.org, Pleiades, and elsewhere.
ABOUT THE PETER H. RAVEN LIBRARY
Missouri Botanical Garden’s Peter H. Raven Library & Archives is globally recognized as one of the most comprehensive libraries of botanical literature in the world.
The Library is vital to the Garden’s mission “to discover and share knowledge about plants and their environment, in order to preserve and enrich life.” It serves as an invaluable and irreplaceable resource that supports the work of Garden scientists, students, and researchers from around the globe seeking to better understand, identify, classify, and conserve plants.
For more information, visit the library’s website.
PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
