Jenny McKean Moore Reading Series Featuring Kyle Dargan
Jenny McKean Moore Reading Series Featuring Kyle Dargan
Join us on Thursday, November 19th at 7:30PM in the Marvin center as the Jenny Mckean Moore Reading Series features Kyle Dargan, who will read from his new collection of poetry, Honest Engine.
Kyle Dargan is the Director of Creative Writing and an Associate Professor at American University. He is the author of three other collections of poetry: The Listening, Logorrhea Dementia, and Bouquet of Hungers. His poems and non-fiction have appeared in publications such as Callaloo, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, The Newark Star-Ledger, Ploughshares, TheRoot.com, and Shenandoah. While a Yusef Komunyakaa fellow at Indiana University, he served as poetry editor for Indiana Review. He is the founding editor of Post No Ills magazine and was most recently the managing editor of Callaloo.
Reviews of Honest Engine
“This Honest Engine is unafraid. It asks questions that men rarely ask: Is there a cure for patriarchy? ‘Must I also think like a fist?’ Will grief and loss swamp us? Sometimes, true, with the poet we wrestle despair, ‘tumbling from an apex of grace.’ But memory can restore, can ‘make enough flames bloom.’ Indeed, Kyle Dargan’s stunning, hurting poems bring us finally to a wary hopefulness that we might begin, at last, to reach across our divisions, racial and otherwise.”
—Sarah Browning, executive director of Split This Rock and author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden
“Honest Engine reveals Kyle Dargan to be a poet fully in command. He marshals the resources of sound and line and syntax into lucid and quietly insistent poems that soldier through loss and wonder to a kind of peace. And yet Dargan’s command, urgent as it is, comes with a beautiful humility. I am awed by this book’s wisdom and calm clarity and moved by its faith. I will read it again and again.”
—Keith D. Leonard, author of Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights
