Join our friends at Austin staple Malvern Books to celebrate the launch of Julie Poole’s Bright Specimen! Julie Poole will be reading her poetry alongside Taisia Kitaiskaia (The Nightgown and Other Poems, Deep Vellum, 2020; Literary Witches; Ask Baba Yaga). Sign up on Zoom via Malvern’s website; details to come.

With the loving eye of an amateur botanist, poet Julie Poole has distilled nature to its finest, tender points. Through poems spread delicately across the page, interspersed with images of the pressed flowers themselves, Poole’s poetry gives voice to a meditative expression of flora. Each poem creates an individual cataloged world through which to explore the body, sexuality, strength, and a devout refusal to admit the separation between humans and nature. Inspired by the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center at The University of Texas at Austin, the largest herbaria in the Southwestern United States, Bright Specimen weaves together a written index through the harmony of botanical wonder.

Julie Poole was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Her first book of poems, Bright Specimen, was inspired by the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center at The University of Texas at Austin. She has received scholarships and fellowship support from the James A. Michener Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, 100 West, and Yaddo. In 2017, she was a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature. She lives in Austin with her growing collection of found butterflies.

Taisia Kitaiskaia is a Russian-American poet and writer. She is the author of The Nightgown and Other Poems; Literary Witches, a collaboration with artist Katy Horan; a divination deck, The Literary Witches Oracle; and two books of advice from the Slavic folklore witch Baba Yaga, Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles and its follow-up, Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times: From Ask Baba Yaga. Her work has been published in A Public Space, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, Fence, Guernica, and elsewhere and her work has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Austin, TX.