Join us for a poetry reading featuring Irène Mathieu and Lauren Alleyne, in celebration of Mathieu's new poetry collection, milk tongue (Deep Vellum Press). The reading will be followed by a book sale and signing, and light refreshments will be provided.

Irène Mathieu’s third collection, milk tongue, refers to the layer of milk that coats a baby’s tongue, which often is a challenge to distinguish from thrush, the overgrowth of naturally occurring yeast. As poet and pediatrician, Mathieu explores how we diagnose and investigate where normal consumption and overconsumption meet. How do we learn what to desire? What happens when what we want is destructive to our world? How might we reconceive of (be)longing in a way that rejects overconsumption?

These poems suggest, “what if, more than place, it’s about sound?” In milk tongue Mathieu uses haibun, long poems, and experimental forms to explore what we inherit or pass on – privilege, oppression, anxiety, “hypnagogic conjure,” and a warming earth – and envisage how, through deep attention to the emotional vibrations under the surface of these phenomena, we might become “both human and an / animal worthy of this speck of dust.”

Irène P. Mathieu (she/her) is an academic pediatrician, writer, and public health researcher. She is author of Grand Marronage (Switchback Books, 2019), which won Editor's Choice for the Gatewood Prize and runner-up for the Cave Canem/Northwestern Prize; orogeny (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017), which won the Bob Kaufman Book Prize; and the galaxy of origins (dancing girl press & studio, 2014). Irène is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Assistant Co-Director of the Program in Health Humanities at the University of Virginia. For more information please visit irenemathieu.com.