Poet Bradley Fest to Open Hartwick Visiting Writers Series

Hartwick College Assistant Professor of English Bradley J. Fest will read from his new book of poetry, The Shape of Things, on Thursday, November 16, 2017, at 7 p.m. in Eaton Lounge, Bresee Hall, on the College campus. The reading, which launches the College’s 2017-18 Visiting Writers Series, will also feature Chelsea Jacobson ’18 reading her works of poetry. Admission is free and the public is invited. Refreshments will be served. Copies of Fest’s book will be available for purchase and signing after the reading.

The Shape of Things continues Fest’s project of poetic assemblage. Written in the age of ubiquitous surveillance and catastrophic climate change, the poems in this volume describe the shape of things in the overdeveloped world and endeavor to challenge the feeling that imagination has been foreclosed in the 21st century.

Of the collection, poet and critic Sten Carlson writes, “If Whitman and Adorno had a knife fight on the ruins of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, The Shape of Things would be the perfect voiceover. Which is to say, though it’s not a pretty scene, there’s pleasure and beauty to be found in the action and music of the syntax and in following the wild movements of this poet’s mind.”

The poet Robin Clarke has also praised the book, calling it “poignant” and rich with the “pathos of humans and machines out of time.” This will be Fest’s first public reading from his new book.

Fest is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015) and The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Empty Mirror, Epigraph, Grain, HVTN, Masque & Spectacle, The Offbeat, PLINTH, TXTOBJX, Short Po[r]tions, Spork, and Verse. He has also written a number of essays on contemporary literature and culture, which have been published in boundary 2, The b2o Review, Critical Quarterly, Critique, David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” (Bloomsbury, 2014), First Person Scholar, Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), The Silence of Fallout (Cambridge Scholars, 2013), Studies in the Novel, and Wide Screen.

For more information on Fest’s work, visit his blog, The Hyperarchival Parallax.

The reading is presented by the Department of English and the Visiting Writers Series at Hartwick College.

For more information on the reading, contact Assistant Professor of English Jake Wolff at wolffj@jartwick.edu or 607 431-4911.