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.
ALYDAR
On the night of November 15, 1990, a champion racehorse named Alydar inexplicably shattered his leg while alone in his stall. Two days later, he was dead. His death, believed by some to be a tragic accident and by others to be a horse-murder for hire, led to the full payout of a $40 million insurance policy.
Jill Mceldowney’s second poetry collection revisits this haunting mystery through epistolary love poems addressed to Alydar. Blending noir-landscape imagery across the mythos and pageantry of horse racing, Mceldowney’s poems explore the lines between devotion and doubt, tenderness and obsession, and ask how much damage two people are willing to endure under the guise of love.
ALYDAR is simultaneously an elegy, an investigation, a nightmare, a love letter, and a collection about the stories we tell ourselves in the aftermath of violence.
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:
