Juliette Wells: A NEW JANE AUSTEN (With Dara G. Friedman-Wheeler)
Come on over to Bird in Hand for an evening with Eric Sneathen in celebration of his latest project, Don’t Leave Me This Way! What might look on the surface like a poetry collection unfolds into a historiographical project around the AIDS epidemic. It blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic in North America.
Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don’t Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.
We’re pleased that Johns Hopkins Professor of English Chris Nealon will read alongside Eric to make for an illuminating evening.
This event will take place at Bird in Hand Coffee & Books, located at 11 E. 33rd St in Charles Village. It is free and open to the public.
Eric Sneathen is a poet and queer literary historian living in Alameda, CA. He is the author of Don’t Leave Me This Way (Nightboat Books, 2023), Minor Work (MO0ON/IO, 2021), and Snail Poems (Krupskaya, 2016). With Lauren Levin, he co-edited the selected fictions of Camille Roy, Honey Mine (Nightboat Books, 2021). Essays and interviews have been published by Jacket2, SF MoMA’s Open Space, Poetry Foundation, Sillages critiques, and Social Text Online.
Chris Nealon is John Dewey Professor in the English Department at Johns Hopkins. He has written three books of criticism: The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (2011), Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (2001), and a collection of essays on poetry and capitalism, called Infinity for Marxists (Brill, 2023). He is the co-editor, with Colleen Lye, of the collection After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the 21st Century (Cambridge UP, 2022). He is also the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Shore (Wave Books), which was a finalist for the 2020 National Critics’ Book Circle Award. Another volume, All About You, will be out from Wave in 2024.
