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Book Launch and Reading by Christopher Stewart
Christopher Stewart is co-author of The Walmart Republic. His poems have appeared in Bryant Literary Review, The Perch, Connecticut River Review, and many other journals. His work frequently addresses themes concerning mental illness and recovery. In his academic career, Stewart served as Dean of Libraries at Illinois Institute of Technology and held faculty appointments at Dominican University and the University of Southern California. He was a 2023 finalist for the Iowa Review Award. Stewart lives in Urbana, Illinois. “In generously insightful and economically crafted poems, What Came After offers revelations such as, “History. We’d rather not know…Until it comes for us. Then we know.” And while Christopher Stewart is right in his perceptions of common human behaviors, his poetry is uncommon. He makes personal history—material about his boyhood, mother, lovers, mental health—a story I very much want to know. Stewart’s poetry is intimate at the same time that it includes others, seeing the migrant crossing the desert in the dark and sensing the presence of the cancer patient down the hall, and connects to a larger sense of the world. His poetry confronts life’s terrors and the threat of its end, yet, thanks to his command of form, music, syntax, and image, when I finish reading this book the feeling that haunts me is, yes, melancholy but, more than that, lovely.”—Rose McLarney, author of Colorfast.
