After After After: Poetry Talk and Workshop with Sara Mae
May 4 @ 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
$15
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Poet Sara Mae will elucidate their writing process for their new chapbook, Phantasmagossip. Sara Mae will lead participants in a discussion of the poems that inspire them to write and share from their own work. Centered primarily around visual poetry, this is a workshop appropriate for writers of all levels. Bring a notebook and invite a friend! Light refreshments offered by the writer!
Registration on Eventbrite is required. There are two ticketing tiers, one tier pay-what-you-can and one tier that includes a copy of Phantasmagossip. Copies of Phantasmagossip will be for sale at H&H Books, too. (Note: This event will be held in H&H Books’ basement workshop, which has stairs and is not ADA-accessible.)
About the author: Sara Mae is a genderqueer writer raised on the Chesapeake Bay. They are a 2023 Big Ears Music Festival Artist Scholar, a 2022 Tinhouse Summer Workshops Attendee, a 2022 Open Mouth Attendee, and a 2021 Sewanee Writer’s Conference Scholar. Their work appears in or is forthcoming from the Georgia Review, POETRY, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, is out via Game Over Books. Their second chapbook, Phantasmagossip, won the Vinyl45 chapbook competition and is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2025. They write shimmery rock music as The Noisy. They received their MFA from UT Knoxville, and currently live in Philly. You can find them on Instagram @veryverynoisy.
About the book: Phantasmagossip by Sara Mae is a packed funeral. The poems mourn shouting over one another to tell a story, squeezing hands of strangers and loved ones, picking at the many homemade mac n cheeses. The game of the Exquisite Corpse, usually played by many, is used here as a way into polyvocality, intimacy, and remembrance. Here, the poems infuse formal tradition with discomfort, adapt the shapes of literary and queer ancestors, speculate fleeting worlds of gender as the speaker sees theirs through and alongside best friends. Phantasmagossip does not romanticize death, but instead grapples with the stakes of gendered violence and the simultaneous desire for pleasure, dissecting accusations of dangerousness levied against women, fems, genderqueer speakers. The speakers seek acceptance of their own queer desires, alongside the grief that being looked at and desired is not always the same as being seen.
