Concord Poetry at the Library Series presents With Verve and Vivid Wild Dreams: Sara Deniz Akant & Jennifer Funk

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Join us for an afternoon with regaled Concord poet Jennifer Funk and Sara Deniz Akant, winner of the 2023 MA Book Award in Poetry, who will read and engage in a Q & A about inspirations and the craft they used in making the poems in these collections.

Sara Deniz Akant describes the backstory of Hyperphantasia which was a New York Times book of the year, a Boston Globe book of the year, and winner of the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. “During the pandemic, I had a lot of internal and external strife. Something about being inside all the time, and the world was clearly ending. I started doing this project— write a poem every day—with a friend, and then continued it with another friend. It was a technique for survival. Like a newspaper, you end up saying whatever’s going on in a very immediate sense: tracking desperations, joys, questions at a basic level. Hyperphantasis is a collection that follows a set of voices that appeared in those daily poems.”

Hyperphantasia, in its haunting 14-line poems (exploding the sonnet’s sonic and imaginative capabilities), explores Akant’s Turkish-American ‘mixed minority’ life and attempts to reclaim the (often damning) myths that surround the culturally mixed, feminized body. Phanta, in her spiritual guide voice, early on asks ‘What will you do with your one wild, precious life?’ In ‘extremely vivid!’ poems of recurring, dialoging fragments from her past and present, Akant invokes a liberating journey for herself in this world and a return to transformative dust when flung ‘up to the stars’.

Critic Reviews:

Akant conjures the ancestral surrealism, something long before the word knew itself. —C A Conrad

There’s a stubborn beauty in these pieces; the poems erupt the same moment they’re read. —Hala Alyan

Akant’s haunting work captures the strangest moments at the end of the world. —Sandra Simonds

If you have any “undealt with trauma,” please do read this book. —Jennifer Tamayo

Sara Deniz Akant is a kind of witch, and this book forges a new genre of alchemical realism. —Chris Kraus

SARA DENIZ AKANT, a Turkish-American poet, educator, and performer, is the author of four books — most recently, Hyperphantasia (Rescue Press 2022), which was a New York Times book of the year, a Boston Globe book of the year, and winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in poetry. She is also the author of Babette (Rescue Press 2015), winner of the Black Box Poetry Prize, Parades (Omnidawn 2014), winner of the Chapbook Prize, and Latronic Strag (Persistent Editions 2014).

She has an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center.

She teaches poetry as Professor of the Practice at Tufts University and co-curates the Kan Yama Kan reading series in Brooklyn.

Jennifer Funk’s debut collection, Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy (Bull City 2023), is a sensuous investigation of the failings and thrills of trying to sate the insatiable. With stark emotive dynamism, Funk examines how domestication contends with wildness and what it costs the savage self to be cared for. Funk gnaws down on a question not for its answer, no, but for the pleasure of the effort of trying to get at something like the truth about what it might cost to share your body, your love, or your life with another person.

Critic Reviews:

“ [In] Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy there’s a shoulders-back head-up embrace of what the world has to offer, an exuberant sense of what’s here for us, as we puzzle out how to make a life that makes some semblance of sense, with integrity and kindness.” —Boston Globe

‘I am at my desk pulling you up from the well / with both hands,’ writes Jennifer Funk— which is both metaphor for my thrill as a reader and how these poems conjure, drawing the indescribable toward the light.—Kerrin McCadden, author of American Wake

 “Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy accommodates pleasure and terror in poems that are at once decadent benders and cautionary tales. A seductive debut by a daring poet.” —Katie Condon, author of Driving Naked

“Might a lyric poem sound bawdy and wise, bossy and meek, mischievous and lovely? I wouldn’t have thought so, or not before reading Jennifer Funk’s debut.—Sally Keith, author of River House

A Concord high school counselor, Jennifer Funk is a native Californian trying to prove her mettle in New England. A graduate of Bennington College and of Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers, she has been a scholarship recipient of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and The Frost Place and was honored with a Friends of Writers’ Levis Post-Graduate Stipend. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Four Way Review, Cimarron Review, Nashville Review, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry classes through the MetroWest Writers’ Guild.

This program is made possible by the generous support of the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, a patron-supported non-profit organization.
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