Wendy Trevino and Oki Sogumi: February 16, 2017

Wendy Trevino reads Sonnets 16-23 from Brazilian is Not a Race. She also reads unpublished work: a response to poet Raquel Salas-Rivera's poem Fingertrap, "Summer 2016" ("It's 11:30 in San Francisco..."), a series of sonnets inspired by pop culture, "My Boyfriend Left to Get Ice Cream and He Ran Into His Friends...," "Verruckt: The World's Tallest Waterslide," inspired by the idea of horrible events occurring at amusement parks, and an untitled poem, beginning "What sucks the most about loss is you don't lose them all at once...."

Oki Sogumi reads the introduction to Smear Jelly and a poem, "Return Policy," about the Boston Marathon bombing. She reads an untitled work ("Negative space was colonized by Martha May..."), and a short series of poems inspired by worlds, both real and imaginary: "Ringworld," "Spiceworld," "Brickworld," and "Fineworld." She then reads "Emily Dickinson's House" and a series of poems inspired by her mother titled "Motherships," "Samsung," "Hyundai." She closes with a series of love poems: "Love Pools," "Hold," and "Corporeal Punishment."

Wendy Trevino and Oki Sogumi take questions from the audience. They discuss racial conflict and racial identity while being subsumed in the culture of the United States, the relationship to a particular nation from multicultural derivations, anti-blackness within the Chicano movement, poetry's advantage over essayistic prose, poetic world-building from both a documentary and fantasy approach, obsessions both continue to write from, including loss, gaps in understanding, and history, and writing around "blockades" by making work they enjoy reading and would give to friends.