Book Signing with Local Poets Joanne Diaz & Steve Halle at Bobzbay Books!

We’re so excited to welcome two incredible local poets, Joanne Diaz and Steve Halle, to the shop for a book signing!
Join us on Saturday, June 13th from 10am-12pm to meet the authors, check out their poetry, and take home a signed book (or few)! Copies of both authors' most recent releases ('Electric Dress' by Joanne Diaz and 'Cow Stomach and Mother Fat' by Steve Halle) will be available for purchase during the event. Read more about each book and author below!
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About 'Electric Dress': In Electric Dress, Joanne Diaz jolts through history like a current, bringing with her the ideas of art, nature, stasis, and progress, considering what’s beautiful and what’s grotesque. Drawing from archival material and visual art objects, Diaz grapples with the personal and the geographical, insisting on the ways we are tied to our pasts and to our landscapes. Electric Dress is a powerful critique of technology, movement, and aesthetics, negotiating together what we inherit and what we wish to disavow.
About Joanne Diaz: Joanne Diaz is the author of The Lessons (winner of the Gerald Cable First Book Award from Silverfish Review Press) and My Favorite Tyrants (winner of the Brittingham Award from the University of Wisconsin Press). With Ian Morris, she is the co-editor of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press), and she is the co-host, with Abram Van Engen, of the Poetry for All podcast. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has also received fellowships from Ragdale and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the Isaac Funk Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.
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About 'Cow Stomach and Mother Fat': In his second full-length poetry collection Cow Stomach and Mother Fat, Steve Halle interrogates how our innermost selves emerge from time immemorial to navigate conditional economies of being. Written and refined over a fourteen-year span, Cow Stomach and Mother Fat employs the dramatis personae of Cow Stomach, Mother Fat, and Ensu Fario, whose monologues and verses use dark comedy to explore ideas of hunger, needfulness, want, desire, and love; emergence and formation of being and identity; how human and nonhuman persons are intertwined and enmeshed in precarious systems; toxicity/toxic masculinity; monstrousness; formlessness; and the politicization and regulation of gender, among other subjects. Halle’s poetry blends aggressive incantatory prose poem streams with softer lyrical flights and stylized design elements to create a sui generis work that reckons with the seemingly sacred forces that may be misused to commodify our most intimate interrelationships.