Left Bank Books Presents a Night of Poetry Featuring James D’Agostino & Aura Martin 3/16 @ 7PM!

Left Bank Books presents a night of poetry from esteemed Truman State University professor and St. Louis area Truman State Alum James D'Agostino & Aura Martin, who will read and discuss their new books of poetry The Goldfinch Caution Tapes & Butterflies Over Flame. Join us in the store or on YouTube Live Page. Order copies of The Goldfinch Caution Tapes & Butterflies Over Flame from Left Bank Books to support authors and independent bookstores! D'Agostino and Martin will personalize and sign copies for sale from Left Bank Books. If you are unable to make it in person, leave a personalization note in your order. James D’Agostino is the author of Nude With Anything (New Issues Press), and three chapbooks which won prizes from Diagram/New Michigan, CutBank Books, and Wells College Press. His chapbook, Gorilla by Jellyfish Light, is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Forklift Ohio, Conduit, Mississippi Review, Bear Review, TriQuarterly, Laurel Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Truman State University, lives in Missouri and Iowa City, Iowa, with his partner, the poet and book artist Karen Carcia. Aura Martin is a writer from Missouri. She is the author of the chapbook, Those Embroidered Suns (Lazy Adventurer Publishing, 2020) and the micro-chapbook, Thumbprint Lizards (Maverick Duck Press, 2019). Aura's work has appeared in EX/POST MAGAZINE, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, perhappened mag, and elsewhere. In Aura's free time, she likes to run, take road trips, and interview writers. About The Goldfinch Caution Tapes Winner of the seventeenth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, Alice Fulton, Judge If it’s true that every landscape is a self-portrait, then The Goldfinch Caution Tapes plein air selfies its way through small-town America. In these counties, acts of seeing and making share densely-tangled root structures. Your eyes aren’t bloodshot, D’Agostino tells us, Your blood just wants a look / for itself. That looking is where each of these poems comes from and heads toward, documenting the natural history of any instant. The narrative, tonal, and syntactical instabilities in these poems always find their momentary stays against disintegration in their immediate surroundings—river’s edge, rural cemetery, gravel road vanishing into field after field. D’Agostino’s poetry is inexhaustible in the most seductive way, and I say that with confidence after rereadings that left me boggled, dazzled, smitten, amazed, wowed, charmed … Though I can’t adequately express the book’s dissonant beauty, I can say it was thrilling to discover poems packed with infinite resonance that are infinitely fun to read … Like the greatest lyric poetry, his poems … keep … exceeding their bounds and creating revelation. What a surprise. What a find. What a cool poet. What a feast. — from Alice Fulton’s foreword This book is a heroic feat of observational meteorology, a rallying cry, and the now definitive handbook on Midwestern punk zazen. These poems move like David Byrne dances: they’re jittery, funny, and deeply soulful all at the same time. They perfectly demonstrate the wild beauty and strangeness of our predicament. ‘Just wait a minute and the bang / keeps getting bigger.’ This book, too, resounds. — Dobby Gibson, author of Little Glass Planet About Butterflies Over Flame A debut collection of centos derived from hybrid sources reflect life, death, upheaval, recovery, and love written in three acts. This full-length of centos, BUTTERFLIES OVER FLAME, is Aura Martin's debut collection. Assembled as a collage, each cento draws from novels, short stories, and poetry. Butterflies Over Flame tells a story in three acts, exploring the various complicated stages of life. These centos build and swell off each other, yet maintain a coherent storyline throughout, from a girl experiencing her first period, a young woman searching for meaningful relationships, a mother grieving the death of her child, and an old woman living alone by the sea. These themes reflect life, death, upheaval, recovery, and love. Wrenching and triumphant, this collection is a must for lovers of found poetry and prose poetry. "Back in the 3rd century BC, when Ausonius started writing centos, perhaps he imagined this formal appropriation would become a form of homage (as Greeks created centos to honor Homer, and the Romans did the same to honor Virgil). This act of tribute through poetic quotation feels viscously alive in Aura Martin's book; lines are liberated and repurposed. There is also bit of dramaturgy, a conscious staging in the sections labeled as Acts, which puts various poets in dialogue with one another on the stage of the poet's imagination. It's a pleasure to wander through the stagings, and Martin reminds me why the cento is such a durable, invocative poetic form."--Alina Stefanescu, author of DOR "Aura Martin's debut of centos is a counter-clock collective that takes us back into raw, undeniab

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