We welcome Leslie Sainz in support of her debut collection of poems, Have You Been Long Enough at Table. She will be joined in conversation by Aaron Coleman and Karyna McGlynn.
About the collection: Have You Been Long Enough at Table is both a question and an invitation in Leslie Sainz's marvelous debut. Sainz probes spirituality with the verve and vitality of Emily Dickinson if Dickinson had been born Cuban American at the end of the last century. Sainz probes the overlap of imagination and experience like Sylvia Plath if Plath was born to a Cuban American landscape between "field crickets, memory, lesser parasites" and "the stain of guava on a plastic cutting board." Have You Been Long Enough at Table articulates the bonds and tensions of independence and tradition, spirit and form, home and exile. The narratives ring with the integrity of memoir and the inventiveness of allegory. Nature, politics, and humor overlap in an image where "The Black Wasps wear green berets." Story is transformed into spell, chant, beat: "Mothers, wives, sisters, daughters radiating as verbs under a mahogany roof." These lyrics of "the land--much in us still" are classic and altogether new. Leslie Sainz is a poet who has been long at the table reading and writing poems and long at the table listening to the poetry of culture and family. She makes questions invitations and memory visible. Come bear witness to a remarkable poet bearing witness.--Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Karyna McGlynn is the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande Books, including 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse, which is a 2023 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, New England Review, and Kenyon Review. Karyna is the Director of Creative Writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts, and is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry in the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan.
