Join Pilsen Community Books as we welcome S. Yarberry and Toby Altman for an event in celebration of S. Yarberry's A Boy in the City. This event will be in person, and masks are still required.

About the book:
In this debut collection of poetry, the obscure and mundane collide, a fricassee of movement, the cosmopolitan, and intimacy. A Boy in the City uses poems as pillars to interrupt and excavate an interiority that unfolds and interrogates grim thoughts and intimacy. Yarberry weaves a sexy, glitzy journey through their city, where the speaker can "pose" and "compose" in a "trans way, of course." Clever in its playful allusions to Greek myths, William Blake, and other literary figures, A Boy in the City is a distinct work of joy and liberation that reckons with the language of gender and desire.

About the presenters:
S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared in AGNI, Tin House, Indiana Review, The Offing, Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, Notre Dame Review, The Boiler, miscellaneous zines, among others. Smith‘s other writings can be found in Bomb Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and Annulet: A Journal of Poetics. They currently serve as the Poetry Editor of The Spectacle; they also run a small magazine called Tyger Quarterly. S. has their MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is now a PhD candidate in literature at Northwestern University where they study twenty and twenty-first century receptions of William Blake. Their first book of poems, A Boy in the City, is forthcoming from Deep Vellum in summer 2022.

Toby Altman is the author of two books, Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2022) and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has held fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Beloit College.