Quiet Lightning is pleased to host a virtual event with Omnidawn Publishing for their seasonal launch of new titles, for which each author will be reading from their work. Hosted by QL director Evan Karp. Be among the first to own these new treasures:

Everyone I Love, Alive by Jason Bayani

Turncoat by Molly Bendall

YEET! by jason b. crawford

Descent by Aria Deepwater

Two Appearances After the Resurrection by Shane McCrae

Coda by Steven Seidenberg

WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. by Rodrigo Toscano

Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected 1974-2024 by John Yau

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

About Everyone I Love, Alive by Jason Bayani

With this collection of poems, Jason Bayani leans into traditions of lyric, song, and prayer to cultivate life while existing within a time of empire and societal collapse. Everyone I Love, Alive wrestles with form to summon both the living and the dead. Bayani’s rich language calls us to experience a connection to cultural heritage and, even during times of oppression, to find the compassion and awareness needed to drive change. These poems show how not only our love and desires—but also our rage and resistance—can be the very things that keep us alive.

Jason Bayani is the author of Locus and Amulet, and his work has been published in World Literature Today, Poem-a-day, Diode Editions, the Offing, and others. He is the co-executive director of Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest multi-disciplinary Asian-Pacific American arts organization in the country.

To have Everyone I Love, Alive sent to your door, order here.

About Turncoat by Molly Bendall

Through the poems in Turncoat, Molly Bendall’s sixth collection, the speaker and other figures dwell under the ever-present eye of surveillance by unspecified authorities. Mistrust and dread become part of the fabric of their lives, as they never know who may be a turncoat—a person who disguises her allegiances and traffics in betrayal. These poems employ an invented paranoid syntax meant to evade oppressive surveillance. A series of intimate and darkly humorous incidents press the speaker to continually adapt to unseen—or even nonexistent—dangers. Haunted by a sense of disorientation and uncertainty about whether old friendships may have been compromised, or if spaces could disappear overnight, Bendall’s poems coax the reader to step across boundaries and snares, alternating between episodes of interrogation and flight. 

Molly Bendall is the author of four previous collections of poetry, After Estrangement, Dark Summer, Ariadne's Island, and Under the Quick. She also has co-authored with the poet Gail Wronsky Bling & Fringe from What Books. Her poems and translations have appeared in many anthologies, including American Hybrid and Poems for the Millenium. She has won the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry, The Lynda Hull Award from Denver Quarterly, and two Pushcart Prizes. Currently she teaches at the University of Southern California.

To have TurnCoat sent to your door, order here.

About YEET! by jason b. crawford

Following the traditions of Eve L. Ewing, Rio Cortez, and Douglas Kearney, jason b. crawford’s YEET! envisions the Black community lifted off the earth and set free towards the stars. These poems ask what a free Black people would look like and how we might achieve such a thing. This collection presents a new take on Afrofuturism and utopianism. Rather than looking to a future of technological change, it steps years ahead to show how people are happier once they are no longer owned. These poems speak to racism, gun violence, colonization, global warming, flight, joy, friendship, and noise. This is a book about creating new worlds without the systems of supremacy that held down the old one.

YEET! is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Sawako Nakasayu.

jason b. crawford (they/he/she) is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their work has been published in POETRY Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and RHINO Poetry, among others. They are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary.

To have YEET! sent to your door, order here.

About Descent by Aria Deepwater

Arria Deepwater’s Descent is a modern fairy tale exploring the vulnerability and strength that come with living in an unconventional body, especially for those living with the experience of disabilities, chronic illness, hyper-medicalization, objectification, and 2SLGBTQIA+ identities. The reader is invited to become an observer of isolation, violation, and the magic of secret joy. Descent moves through entangled connections and dissolving boundaries between humanity and the natural world as it seeks to weave a spell of protection for those whose bodies do not conform, for whom existence is a radical act of rebellion and creativity.

Exploring boundaries of intimacy, fluidity, and grief, Deepwater brings an eco-feminist speculative twist to the growing canon of writers with marginalized identities. Deepwater considers the fractured reality of living in a queer disabled body and how we might find freedom, safety, and spiritual healing despite grief.

Descent is the winner of Omnidawn’s 2022 Fabulist Fiction Contest, chosen by Michelle Ruiz Keil.

Arria Deepwater is a writer and spiritual practitioner living in the unceded Omàmiwinini territory known as Ontario, Canada.

To have Descent sent to your door, order here.

Two Appearances After the Resurrection by Shane McCrae

This is a book about perceiving and being perceived. The various subjects of these poems are viewed by an artist, a devil, a soul floating out of a body it had inhabited, a god fed up with her husband’s infidelities, and a father whose young child has COVID-19. The poems of Two Appearances After the Resurrection are haunted by the question of what one ought to do with their perceivability.

After a decade of publishing poems almost exclusively utilizing no punctuation aside from the slash, Shane McCrae began including semi-regular punctuation in his 2023 book, The Many Hundreds of the Scent. He continues that project in Two Appearances After the Resurrection. Here, he further explores the consequences—especially the rhythmical consequences—of the change. Throughout these poems, McCrae perceives and implicitly considers his own shifting approaches to writing.

Shane McCrae is the author of poetry collections including New and Collected Hell and The Many Hundreds of the Scent and a memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun. McCrae has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

To have Two Appearances After the Resurrection to your door, order here.

About Coda by Steven Seidenberg

The nameless narrator of Coda attempts to trace the origins of linguistic and perceptual differentiation by experimenting with contemporary lyric and narrative forms. Moving between extravagant prosody and obsessive disquisition, Seidenberg’s poetry works to reconfigure conceptual imperatives found throughout philosophy and theology. With a focus on the structure of memory and the decadence of the body, Seidenberg describes the epistemological regress of desire, intention, knowledge, and discernment.

Seidenberg brings together the language and concerns of figures including Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, alongside elements of raucous humor drawn from the tradition of Rabelais, Beckett, Lispector, and Sterne.

Steven Seidenberg is a writer and artist based in San Francisco. He is the author of Anon, plain sight, Situ, Null Set, Itch, numerous chapbooks, and two collections of photographs: Architecture of Silence: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South and Pipevalve: Berlin.

To have Coda sent to your door, order here.

About WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. by Rodrigo Toscano

This four-part collection of poetic fables engages the emerging field of global-poetics through Hispano-Americano lenses. Amid global crises between states, and cultural destabilization manifesting across mass popular culture and literature, WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. sets out to invigorate conversation about how the United States might adapt to a wider hemispheric consciousness. Toscano’s poems present a cultural landscape where the Anglo-capitalist outlook is tempered—if not subsumed—by a Greater Americas “Salamanca Humanism,” which was the basis for the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The book is divided into four sections that develop the idea of a Greater Americas as hinging on negotiation between Anglo and Hispano values, consider a potential catastrophic Anglo-American imperialism, imagine life in a Post-Empire crisis, and compose allegories about the historical consciousness of a people oversaturated with media.

Rodrigo Toscano is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Cut Point and The Charm & The Dread. His poetry has been published in Best American Poetry, Best American Experimental Poetry, Boston Review, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Yale Review, and Fence, among others.

To have WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. sent to your door, order here.

About Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected 1974-2024 by John Yau

This collection brings together work from half a century of writing by John Yau. Preoccupied with forms and musical structures, Yau’s work includes sestinas, sonnets, pantoums, and lists, as well as invented forms. Employing both strict and open-ended frameworks, Yau creates multi-faceted poems that can shift abruptly from humor to outrage and consider topics including Chinese American identity, school shootings, invented countries, and haunted memories. Some poems are grounded in an autobiographical voice, while others take on the voices of other characters, including contemporary artists and a fictional Chinese private eye.

Spanning the vast diversity of Yau’s forms and subjects, the poems in Diary of Small Discontents add up to an unapologetically original collection.

John Yau is a poet, art critic, fiction writer, and publisher whose recent books include Tell it Slant, Genghis Chan on Drums, and Please Wait by the Coat Room: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art. He founded Black Square Editions and cofounded the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, and Academy of American Poets, among others. He is professor emeritus at Rutgers University and lives in Beacon, New York.

To have Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected 1974-2024 sent to your door, order here.

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This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Authors and books are pictured above as listed, clockwise from top left.

Background image is from Quiet Lightning's event Poetry in Parks 2025, held at China Camp State Park. Photo by Evan Karp.