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Prairie Lights Virtual - Zoom: Kirsten Ihns & Benjamin Krusling

Please join us for a reading and conversation between poets Kirsten Ihns and Benjamin Krusling to celebrate their latest books, sundaey and Glaring.

To join this virtual event, register here.

Anthony Madrid, author of RHINO says of Kirsten Ihns' sundaey, “What are the poems like? Inventive, capricious, witty, aphoristic. There are bebop parts where what she’s doing is throwing words into a pan slicked with boiling oil and watching ’em explode all over the kitchen…If you set about making your first book with your eyes steady on the prize (“What do I really like? what do I actually get off on?”) you might coin a classic. That’s what I think we’re looking at here. Now the issue is: Can she keep from being corrupted by reviews like this.” 

Kirsten Ihns is a poet and researcher from Atlanta, GA and Pensacola, FL. She also makes collaborative films with the artist Brett Swenson. Her first book is sundaey (Propeller Books, 2020). She earned her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow, and she is currently a PhD candidate and Neubauer Presidential Fellow in English at the University of Chicago, where she studies perceptual rhythms in long-form contemporary poetry and film. Individual poems appear or are forthcoming in Hyperallergic, Fence, jubilat, Bennington Review, The Iowa Review, The Canary, TAGVVERK, and elsewhere. Her website is kirsten.website

Lucy Ives says of Benjamin Krusling's latest book "Glaring is a beautiful and powerful, brilliant collection, combining energies of various modernisms with elegant maneuverings through the bleak media of contemporary America. Concerned with institutions—race, health, school, sports, police, family, money, history—as well as the shifting fortunes of affection and the self, these poems utterly transform two other well-worn institutions: the lyric and the page. Every line in this indelible book was my favorite."

Benjamin Krusling is the author of a chapbook, GRAPES (Projective Industries, 2018) and a text-image project, I have too much to hide (forthcoming from Triple Canopy, 2020). Prose and poems have appeared in HyperallergicThe New InquiryBlack Warrior ReviewDenver QuarterlyTerritoryThe RecluseWashington Square Review, and Tagvverk—and work has been awarded the Sonora Review Poetry Prize in addition to Pushcart Prize nominations. He has been awarded the Amiri Baraka scholarship from Naropa University and supported by residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Blue Mountain Center. His work has been anthologized in the Bodies Built for Game anthology of contemporary sports writing and presented at The Poetry Project, The Kitchen, the Segue Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House and other venues. Benjamin received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was awarded an Iowa Arts Fellowship and a postgraduate Provost’s Visiting Writer fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn. 

Krusling photo credit | An Duplan

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