Observable Readings: Lisa Low & Jill Mceldowney
November 16 @ 7:00 pm
The reading will be held in-person at High Low.
Saint Louis Poetry Center welcomes poets Lisa Low and Jill Mceldowney for Observable Readings.
Books available for purchase from Left Bank Books.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
REPLICA
Stand-up comedy, a celebrity non-apology, observations of racism, and the slipperiness of nostalgia underpin Replica. In poignant, witty poems, Lisa Low navigates the tensions of solidarity and hostility in white spaces as she sets out to write differently about race.
“The problem of being with a white man is also a problem of writing,” Low says in a prose poem that turns writing about identity on its head. She peers in from outside the poem, as if through an open ceiling. The poem itself becomes a site of investigation—a counterpoint to constricting narratives about Asian American identity—reimagined as a dollhouse, a stage with props, an image the speaker wears like a bodysuit. Replica asks what it means to represent yourself and your experiences in a world where you are indistinguishable from others.
OTHERLIGHT
“Jill Mceldowney’s Otherlight plunges us into the rarefied limbo of grief. Suspended in time, in action, in ice, its speaker is halfway out the door of this world-is half-turned to follow the beloved who hovers, conjured, just at the edges of these pages. Otherlight‘s iconoclasm is arresting and terrifying; it rejects the advances of a world that refuses to understand that sometimes the past is a mine we never want to be hauled from. In these lyrical, annihilating poems, Mceldowney shows us how a life can be utterly derailed by a death; how even after a lightning-struck past, choosing to stay alive can be the biggest risk of all.”
– Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater and Wilder
ABOUT THE POETS
LISA LOW is the author of Replica (University of Wisconsin Press, 2026) and the chapbook Crown for the Girl Inside (YesYes Books, 2023). She is the recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize and the 2020 Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, and her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Maryland, she lives in Chicago.
JILL MCELDOWNEY is the author of the full-length collections ALYDAR (YesYes Books) and Otherlight (YesYes Books), winner of a North American Book Award. She is a founder and editor of Madhouse Press. She is a recipient of a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her previously published work can be found in publications such as The Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier, Muzzle, and other notable publications.
VENUE
The Observable Readings series is supported in part by:
