More Than Organs Poetry Reading featuring Kay Ulanday Barret

More Than Organs Poetry Reading Featuring Kay Ulanday Barrett

Thursday, October 21, 2021 at 5pm pt / 8pm ct

On Instagram Live @libromobile

A love letter to Brown, Queer, and Trans futures, Kay Ulanday Barrett’s More Than Organs questions "whatever wholeness means” for bodies always in transit, for the safeties and dangers they silo. These poems remix people of color as earthbenders, replay “the choreography of loss” after the 2015 Pulse shooting, and till joy from the cosmic sweetness of a family’s culinary history. Barrett works "to build / a shelter // of / everyone / [they] meet,” from aunties to the legendary Princess Urduja to their favorite air sign. More Than Organs tattoos grief across the knuckles of its left hand and love across the knuckles of its right, leaving the reader physically changed by the intensity of experience, longing, strength, desire, and the need, above all else, to survive.

About The Author

Kay Ulanday Barrett aka @Brownroundboi is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They are a three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. They have featured at The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, The Hemispheric Institute, Symphony Space, Princeton, & more. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Bitch Media, Colorlines, The Advocate, Asian American Literary Review, Al Jazeera English, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, Frontier Poetry, Buzzfeed, and more. Currently, they remix their mama’s recipes and live in Jersey City with their jowly dog.

Praise for More Than Organs:

"'What is hunger ... but the carving out of emptiness.' And so in their defiant poetry collection, More Than Organs, Kay Ulanday Barrett excavates and hollows out a queer, trans, brown body to expose, examine, and interrogate the difficulties and heartaches of such existence. What is discovered is forged out of anger, injustice, defiance and love. These shapeshifting poems are insistent and persistent in their brazen attempts at making flesh and whole the undefinable nature of gender, race and physical/social being. I admire their direct honesty, how they rage! And how ultimately 'the body is a letter/folded backward, all strange angles, confessions.'" — Joseph O. Legaspi, author of Threshold and Imago

You can follow them on Instagram @Brownroundboi

More Than Organs and When The Chant Comes is available in-store & online.

See you virtually soon!