Friends,
Today is the official publication date for R E D, by Chase Berggrun!
It’s available now as a Handpicked title for May from SPD. Get 20% off with code HANDPICKED.
It was also #10 on SPD’s Poetry Bestsellers List for April 2018.
Reviews
In their starred ⭐️ review, Publisher’s Weekly had this to say about R E D:
“In Berggrun’s striking debut, a book-length erasure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, that text becomes fertile soil for cultivating complex story of sexual awakening, domestic abuse, and liberation. Indeed, if flipping Stoker’s novel into a feminist narrative is a somewhat straightforward reversal, Berggrun’s poems convey that narrative’s stark circumstances with a poignancy and rage difficult to achieve. When the speaker asserts that “I am sane though proving it has been dreadful,” readers hear her triumphant reclamation of agency after abuse and recognize its resonance with the process of gender transition in a transphobic society.”
The latest issue of wildness includes a review of R E D by Terry Abrahams, who calls it, “Beautiful, poignant, inspiring, and, despite it all, optimistic in its narrator’s defiance and will to live, R E D is as assured of itself as it is assuring to read.”
Readings
If you’re in the NYC area, you can hear Chase read from R E D
May 25 7:00 PM
Lauren Hilger & Chase Berggrun
Bwe Kafe
1002 Washington St, Hoboken, NJ
May 26, 4:30 PM
Segue Reading Series: Chase Berggrun & Precious Okoyomon
Zinc Bar
82 West 3rd Street
June 5, 6:00 PM
NYU Writers in New York Summer Program
Lillian Vernon Writer’s House
58 West 10th St.
News
Selections from R E D are in the latest issue of Poetry Magazine
Hear Chase read from that selection, as well as the editors discuss those poems in the “Darlings” episode of the Poetry Magazine Podcast.
Praise
"R E D is a thoroughly modern transfeminist work that recoups deep ontological value from a misogynist text. Berggrun pulls tropes out of their source, like storms, wolves, and blood, but reassigns each meaning and purpose. The characters generalize into pronouns: I, she, he. Out of the cacophony of voices in Dracula, a new and singular narrative perspective emerges: the poet, or a different Mina (or a Mina trying to parse the nebulous, existential threat of difference). The sumptuous language of the pulpy original fractures and reforms into striking verse. This book has fangs. Like creeping through winding tunnels under a castle, it explores the violence and glory of gender on both intellectual and bodily levels. It is a strange and wonderful feat to have harnessed this monster Dracula and rewritten its DNA. This is a major win for the publisher, the author, and poetry at large. Any other title vying for best book of the year has formidable competition."
-Lønely Christopher
Thank you for your support.
Love,
The Birds