by Writing Workshops Staff
2 months ago
From WritingWorkshops.com and Gemini Ink:
Watch our discussion on The Big Texas Author Talk with poet Sasha West, author of How to Abandon Ship, moderated by Jill Meyers, editorial director of A Strange Object, the Austin-based imprint of independent publisher Deep Vellum.
Poet Sasha West, author of How to Abandon Ship.
About How to Abandon Ship
In How to Abandon Ship, Sasha West emerges like a modern Cassandra, one who doesn’t simply tell us of what is to come, but one who teaches us, “To bite. To keen. To howl.” West is an oracle whose words pop, hiss, and blaze. This terrific book has left me changed. –Tomás Q. Morín
The poems in Sasha West’s How to Abandon Ship describe the anguish and disorientation of existing on a planet put in jeopardy by our very existence. Here we encounter a poet who has “spent a life sharpening the blade of [her]/imagination” slicing through the layered voices of greed, complicity, and blind faith that have left us with a world in peril and the painful task of telling our children the truth about it. Embodying the voice of a modern-day Cassandra, West reveals a fundamental truth of our time: how a warning can be a blessing, but only if we’re willing to receive it.—Carrie Fountain
How to Abandon Ship is equal parts prophetic and apocalyptic, and Sasha West doesn’t shy away from the exigencies of the world: its floods and fires and earthquakes, its wars and disease and mass graves, its politics and tragedies and technology where “software reminded us / to have memories.” “I love: my country: it can break me,” writes West, and these powerful poems limn the urgency of our present moment, as well as the tenderness and terror of new motherhood when the speaker becomes “permeable to the world.” How to Abandon Ship is a haunting book of grief and warning, but also one of caregiving and survival. West’s poems ultimately offer a blueprint for meeting disaster head-on—with fierce love, acts of service, and the power of imagination. - Erika Meitner
ABOUT SASHA WEST
Sasha West was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, won the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. It was also selected as one of ten debut books by Victoria Chang for Poets & Writers. Her second book, How to Abandon Ship, was published by Four Way Books in March 2024.
She collaborates on multi-media, eco-arts exhibitions with visual artist Hollis Hammonds as the collaborative Hammonds + West. Their collaborations have been featured at Texas A&M University’s Wright Gallery, the Austin Public Library Central Gallery space, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, the College of the Mainland, ArtPrize2023 in Michigan, and the Columbus College of Art and Design. Upcoming shows include Houston’s Art League and The Grace Museum in Abilene, TX.
Her work has been collected in the anthologies The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood,Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency, Still Life with Poem: 100 Natures Mortes in Verse, Penned: Zoo Poems, and others. Individual poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Agni, American Poet, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.
Her awards include a Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Houston Arts Alliance grant, Pushcart nominations, and Inprint’s Verlaine Prize. She has served as lead editor for and, later, board president of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.
Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award and the Hudspeth Innovative Teaching Award. She lives in Austin, TX, with her husband and kid.
ABOUT JILL MEYERS
Jill Meyers is the editorial director of A Strange Object, the Austin-based imprint of independent publisher Deep Vellum. Her acclaimed writers have received numerous awards and honors, including the Whiting Award, The Believer Book Award, and the Discovery Award from the Writers' League of Texas. Titles from A Strange Object have appeared on NPR’s Best Books of the Year list and have been selected as best debuts from Poets and Writers. Formerly, Jill served as editor for the celebrated literary magazine American Short Fiction and worked on staff at Texas Monthly. Jill is the cofounder of Lit Crawl Austin, a freewheeling literary showcase, and she serves on the advisory board for the Texas Book Festival. A Free Monthly Online Lecture Series from WritingWorkshops.com & Gemini Ink.
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