Author Talks, Poetry Programming: Reimagining the Poetry Collection: Morgan Võ and Steve Mentz in Conversation (Online)

Join poets Morgan Võ, author of The Selkie, and Steve Mentz, author of Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels, for an online reading and discussion of their work. Both of these poets, though remarkably different in their approaches, expand the boundaries of the form in their new collections. Hear about their perspectives on the written word, narrative experimentation, and what the future holds for poetry at-large.

Morgan Võ is a poet and librarian concerned with resonance, contingency, difficulty understanding, and the presence of the dead among the living. He is the author of The Selkie (The Song Cave, 2024) and the chapbooks Lights of Earth (2019) and Eat Pamphlet (2014). Their poems were anthologized in Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles, and have recently appeared in Changes Review and Footnotes. From 2020 to 2021 he organized G-L-O-S-S, a mutual aid-based poetry press, and was a member of the editorial collective for the Poetry Project Newsletter from 2022 to 2025. Originally from coastal Virginia, he lives now in Brooklyn, New York.

The Selkie (The Song Cave, 2024) is Morgan Võ’s fascinating and highly original debut, is organized into three linked sections, animated by jokes, confusion, existential horror, and banality, often revealing the gaps in understanding that tangle this string of vignettes. In an outdoor market, we meet an unlikely hero in The Monger, buying and selling fish from his stall while the poems around him touch on topics of racial capitalism, cultural ties to animals and food, dislocation, diaspora, and the impacts of the nuclear family. Also included are The Monger’s own written documents that propose a series of year-long performance pieces, each seemingly created to test and explore his specific individuality among a community of displaced histories. Võ investigates how the shadows of larger global issues link with our intimate and daily interactions, and The Selkie introduces an entirely unique voice within the landscape of contemporary American poetry.

Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. John’s University and author of An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2023), Ocean (2020) and a poetry chapbook, “Swim Poems” (2022). He also writes and curates The Bookfish Blog at www.stevementz.com.

Sailing without Ahab is a cycle of one hundred thirty-eight poems—one for each chapter in Moby-Dick, plus the Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue—launches into oceanic chaos without the stabilizing mad focus of the Nantucket captain. Guided by waywardness and curiosity, these poems seek an alien ecopoetics of marine depths, the refraction of light, the taste of salt on skin. Directionless, these poems reach out to touch oceanic expanse and depth. It’s not an easy voyage, and not a certain one. It lures you forward. It has fixed its barbed hook in I.

Sailing without means relinquishing goals, sleeping at the masthead, forgetting obsessions. I welcome you to trace wayward ways through these poems. Read them any way you can—back to front, at random, sideways, following the obscure promptings of your heart. It’s the turning that matters. It’s a blue wonder world that beckons.

This program will take place online via Google Meet. Registration is required to receive the link to attend.