Melissa Tuckey Book Launch: Tenuous Chapel

Melissa Tuckey Launches Award-Winning 

First Book

Tenuous Chapel  

    

Sunday March 24, 2013

   5-7 pm

NOTE LOCATION: Busboys and Poets (14th & V)

2021 14th Street NW

Washington, DC 20009

Join Melissa Tuckey, co-founder of Split This Rock, for a book launch and reading from her award-winning book of poems, Tenuous Chapel. With special guests, Sarah Browning, E. Ethelbert Miller and Joseph Ross.

Tenuous Chapel was chosen by Charles Simic for the prestigious ABZ first book award. In his forward, Simic writes, "If the hope of any poem is to render the experience in a fresh unsettling way, she has that gift." The book moves from the intimate and personal to the communal and political. It's a search for the sacred in a time of war and environmental destruction.

Join us as we toast Melissa and celebrate this exciting book of poems!  

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR TENUOUS CHAPEL:

"Melissa Tuckey's voice and vision are entirely her own. These precise and surprising poems reinvent a kind of Imagism with fresh eyes and a profound sense of real-world compassion, a poetry hard-earned and patiently well made."   Sam Hamill

“The poems in Melissa Tuckey’s Tenuous Chapel are stark yet radiant, ecstatic yet somber, metaphysical yet grounded in the intimate, the communal, and the political.  She confronts the bewildering complexity of a violent world with candor and clarity, with wit and grace, with tenderness and wisdom. It is hard not to be held by the spell of these enigmatic and uncanny poems that delight and surprise at the turn of each line."  Eric Pankey

"The poems in this impressive first book are evocative, elusive, spare, with heady feats of juxtaposition: Melissa Tuckey has pared their engaging narrative and descriptive elements down to emotional essences that invite the reader’s involvement. Highlighting both family matters and larger political and social issues, the poems often reference disappearance, and many are set in winter; but the builder of this Tenuous Chapel is ultimately able to 'make green an offering' and 'believe in progress at a time when / everything is going backward.' " Martha Collins