
Katie Ford will read from her new poetry collection If You Have to Go. Beginning in the cramped space of selfhood―in the bedroom, cluttered with doubts, and in the throes of marital loss―these poems edge toward the clarity of “what I can know and admit to knowing.” An extraordinary sequence at the heart of this book taps into the radical power of the sonnet form, bending it into a kind of metaphysical and psychological outcry. “[Ford is] one of the most important American poets at work today.”—Dunya Mikhail
Ford is the author of Blood Lyrics, named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Colosseum, recognized as a “Best Book of the Year” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review; and Deposition. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she currently teaches at the University of California, Riverside.