Ange Mlinko (Foxglovewise) James Merrill Fellow Reading

Bank Square Books and The James Merrill House present an author talk and reading with fellow, Ange Mlinko. Register About the Book Ange Mlinko, whose poetry is “irresistible” (Los Angeles Review of Books), opens our perception of other lives, or lives unlived.

Foxglovewise is, at its core, a response to the singular experience of the loss of one’s parents. It begins at an Eastern Orthodox Epiphany ritual in Florida and ends in a cemetery in Los Angeles.

Yet, as with Ange Mlinko’s other books of poetry, the collection uses geography as a trope for the ways in which we try to map out our lives and make them legible, even as poetry, music, and paintings suggest that much of what happens, or matters, to us is “not on the maps” (not to mention “the apps”). Whether it’s Europa borne over the waves, or gravestones bearing aliases rather than birth names, or books bequeathed to us by relatives in languages we can’t read, we live “up in the air” or “on the wing” and not in fixed coordinates.

Mlinko’s poetry is suffused with wit, erudition, beauty, and boundless energy. As Declan Ryan wrote of her work in The Times Literary Supplement, “A reader could be merely dazzled by all this surface stylishness . . . but then they would miss the heart beneath it all.” Foxglovewise is a direct line to the author’s heart.

About the Author Ange Mlinko is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Foxglovewise, and a book of lyric criticism, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets. A new chapbook, Darkroom, is available from Foolscap Press in Nashville.

She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books, and has received the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism as well as the Frederick Bock Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and residencies at Hawthornden Castle and Civitella Ranieri. She has taught workshops at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminars, and currently teaches poetry at the University of Florida, where she directs the MFA program.