08/25/2026
Join us as we welcome Emily Skaja and Marcus Wicker on Tuesday, September 8th at 6PM to celebrate the release of each of their new poetry collections, BLACK LAKE by Emily Skaja and DEAR MOTHERSHIP by Marcus Wicker.
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ABOUT BLACK LAKE:
A frank new book about the devastation of recurring pregnancy loss, by the author of the award-winning Brute
The black lake at the center of Emily Skaja's brilliant and startling second collection is a watery abyss of grief without bottom, threatening to drag her down into its depths. Her only escape, she believes, is to conceive and carry a child, but multiple miscarriages bring her to the brink of drowning. At the same time, the political and cultural turn of post-Roe America imperils basic human rights as essential health care for women now hangs in doubt.
Black Lake documents a desperate desire to create life despite an increasingly inhospitable and unsustainable world. Skaja's poems are astonishing confrontations with depression, yet they are also marked by a strange and disarming humor--a wry satire of our precarious time and her own despair. This is an unflinching book, a harsh recognition that life goes on with or without the permission of the grieving self. "Who are you to say, / I lost the world?" Skaja asks. "No one. To admit / that you held the world at all?
ABOUT DEAR MOTHERSHIP:
From the author of Maybe the Saddest Thing and Silencer comes a playful yet profound poetry collection that orbits the intersections of public loss, private grief, (dis)connection, capitalism, and identity.
In Dear Mothership, Marcus Wicker channels the lyrical dexterity of Outkast and the speculative vision of poet Robert Hayden to chart a course through personal and political upheaval.
The collection's centerpiece is the "Break Beat Crown"--Wicker's original take on the heroic crown of sonnets--presented as a travelogue from an extraterrestrial who has touched down in modern-day Atlanta. Across linked poems, the outsider records field notes on pandemic discord, isolation, tenderness, late-stage capitalism, empathy, and art. The longer the speaker inhabits a dysfunctional society, the more alien he feels. In addition to these science fictional experiments, Wicker delivers affecting, personal poems grounded in lived experience: lingering grief over two miscarriages, the sudden death of a friend, a sustained search for joy on the other side of those heartbreaks.
With its singular imagination, Dear Mothership kindles a new understanding of what makes us most human.
