[Cwgrad-announcements] Ching-In's Book Release Party

[cflow001 at student.ucr.edu]

Come celebrate the release of Ching-In Chen's The Heart Traffic & Ely Shipley's Boy With Flowers!

>From Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, The Heart's Traffic is Ching-In's debut collection of poems.  This novel-in-poems chronicles the life of Xiaomei, an immigrant girl haunted by the death of her best friend. Told through a kaleidoscopic braid of stories, letters, and riddles, this stunning debut collection follows Xiaomei's life as she grows into her sexuality and searches for a way to deal with her complicated histories.  At times, meditation, celebration, investigation, and elegy, this is a book about personal transformation within the context of a family forced to make do—a Makeshift Family—and how one might create new language to name the New World.  www.chinginchen.com


Ely Shipley's first book of poems, Boy with Flowers, won the 2007 Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips who wrote:  "Boy with Flowers stands in the crosshairs of societally imposed notions of gender and the gender we instinctively know to be our own, inside; but for gender, we might substitute memory also, for these poems are everywhere concerned with the tension between what we remember and what can't possibly have occurred, between what occurred and what we resist remembering, the memories 'darkening everywhere/they'[ve] been touched.'  It is as if identity consisted only of the many selves we can still remember, and the self were 'an endless chain/of colored scarves//unfolding from the magician's sleeve.'" www.elyshipley.com 

Thursday, February 19, 2008, 7pm. 
Riverside book release party
Main branch, Riverside Public Library 
3581 Mission Inn Ave, Riverside, CA. 
Free. 
Info: Inlandia Institute at (951) 826-5713. 

Friday, February 20, 2009. 7:30pm 
Featured Reader at Skylight Books 
1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA. 
Free 
Info: www.skylightbooks.com 

Wednesday, February 25, 2009. 8pm 
Featured Reader at Ugly Mug Caffe. (Ching-In Chen only)
261 North Glassell Ave, Orange, CA. 
Info: www.poetryidiots.com