Wang’s searing exploration reveals how she and her family were forced to navigate the yawning cracks in the American Dream. “Beautiful Country rings with power and authenticity. Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light. In China, Qian’s parents were professors in America, her family is “illegal” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive. In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to “beautiful country.” Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In the incandescent Marie de France – visionary, cantankerous and uncowed by the constraints of her sex – Groff paints a portrait of sisterhood that shines out of the past and into the lives of women today.”-C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills is Gold Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world. Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey. In Lauren Groff’s extraordinary new novel Matrix, we find ourselves in the twelfth century. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power what you’ll hear in return is “a lifetime of song.” At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls’ night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Ali’s conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives. MORE ABOUT TONIGHT’S AUTHORS AND THEIR BOOKS: Access to the Festival’s virtual platform will be via a sliding scale ($0–$100) pass one pass includes access to all five days of virtual events. From November 8–12, Portland Book Festival will feature authors in a variety of virtual events, from live-streamed discussions to podcast and radio broadcasts. Rita Dove, American poet, writer, former U.S.This year’s VIRTUAL Festival programming is presented by Bank of America.This episode was originally produced 4-19-22. You can also chat about book club selections and other literary interests with Charity and hundreds of other readers in the Talk of Iowa Book Club Facebook Group. Interested in joining the next meeting of the Talk of Iowa Book Club? The 2023 Book Club reading list is now available. Marquart and Morris delve into Dove's collection to talk about form, structure and themes. Her most recent book is Who Do with Words: A Blerd Love Tone Manifesto. She is a professor of poetry at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Morris is the writer and editor of several books, a poet and performer. Marquart's most recent book is The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays Between Exile & Belonging. She is an author, poet, musician and a distinguished professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University. Later in the podcast, expert readers Debra Marquart and Tracie Morris join the conversation. Dove joins host Charity Nebbe for this Talk of Iowa Book Club conversation to reflect on her work. Her most recent work is Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems, released in 2021. She has received the National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Poet Laureate in 1993 and was the first Black American to fill that role. She has since become one of the most celebrated poets in American History. Dove grew up in Ohio but spent time in Iowa earning her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1977.
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