Poets Sarah Browning and David Keplinger read their work, including from their latest books, Killing Summer and Another City.

About Killing Summer

“Poetry must be honest and precise, yes—but it must also dare us to see what we are invited not to see and say what seems easier not to say. In Killing Summer, Sarah Browning writes what is difficult but essential in a time when buffoonery in our nation’s highest office tempts us to shake our heads and close our eyes. Perhaps the first step in asserting the need for a new paradigm is finding the words that reveal the brokenness of the current one. These are those words. With both tender ferocity and subtle elegance, this book helps to sustain us.” - Tim Seibles

About Another City:

A rich portrait of the seemingly incommunicable expanses between people, places, and ideas—and the ability of a poem to transcend the void. 

How does it feel to experience another city? To stand beneath tall buildings, among the countless faces of a crowd? To attempt to be heard above the din?

The poems of Another City travel inward and outward at once: into moments of self-reproach and grace, and to those of disassociation and belonging. From experiences defined by an urban landscape—a thwarted customer at the door of a shuttered bookstore in Crete, a chance encounter with a might-have-been lover in Copenhagen—to the streets themselves, where “an alley was a comma in the agony’s grammar,” in David Keplinger’s hands startling images collide and mingle like bodies on a busy thoroughfare.

Yet Another City deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. In these poems, our entry into the world is when “the wound, called loneliness, / opens,” and our voyage out of it is through a foreign but not entirely unfamiliar constellations of cities: Cherbourg, Manila, Port-au-Prince.

A moving, haunting atlas to worlds both interior and exterior.

Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry, 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007). She is co-founder and Executive Director of Split This Rock and an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. She is the recipient of artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Adirondack Center for Writing, and the Creative Communities Initiative. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and POETRY magazine. Since 2006, Browning has co-hosted the Sunday Kind of Love poetry series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC. She previously worked supporting socially engaged women artists with WomenArts and developing creative writing workshops with low-income women and youth with Amherst Writers & Artists. She has been an organizer in public housing communities and a grassroots political organizer on a host of social and political issues.

David Keplinger is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018) and three volumes of collaborative translations from the Danish and German, including Carsten René Nielsen's House Inspections (BOA Editions Ltd, 2011) and Jan Wagner's The Art of Topiary (Milkweed Editions, 2017). He has won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Cavafy Prize, the Colorado Book Award, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. Keplinger teaches at American University in Washington, D.C. 

600 H Street NE, Washington, DC 20002

This event is FREE and open to all. Let us know you’re coming on Facebook.