Iowa Writers’ Workshop Poetry alum Alyssa Perry and Rescue Press poet Daisy Atterbury will read from their new books, Oily Doily, and The Kármán Line.
Razor-edged, stagger-rhymed, Oily Doily is a diamond saw. Its music is intricate and remorseless as its subject: empire, centuries of bourgeois kitsch, 80s flicks, tech strip - mining our curiosity, sympathy, and desire for solidarity. Miraculously, the poetry work doesn’t fall for despair but offers clarity within clarity, glittering surfaces within aqueous depths. You’ll emerge from this debut wire-crossed and pilled. After a hundred pages, I’d gladly read two hundred more.“—Joe Hall

Alyssa Perry is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of Oily Doily (Bench Editions, 2024). Her writing appears with Annulet, The Canary, Coma, Fence, Mercury Firs, River Styx, the Experimental Sound Studio, and other venues. Perry is poetry editor at the Cleveland Review of Books and an editor at the small press publisher Rescue Press. She lives in Ohio and teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Find her online at alyssaperry.net.

Daisy Atterbury will read from The Kármán Line. "Above the Kármán line--the edge between earth and outer space--air is too thin to be turned into property. Space there is 'free, ' untethered from the territorial logic of the nation state. In dazzling prose, Atterbury explores the implosion of the colonial imaginary when thrust to an atmospheric breaking point. Writing from desert drives, sites of radioactive spills, queer loneliness, touristic space stations, they chronicle history at a molecular level--atoms of disaster lodged in the bodies we share and the water we drink. With disarming softness, The Kármán Line erodes the ideology of containment.”- Mirene Arsanios

Daisy Atterbury  is a poet, essayist and scholar. Their work has appeared in BOMB, Jacket2, The Paris Review Daily, and Post-45 Journal. In 2022-23, they served as Donald C. Gallup Research Fellow at Yale University. They have been the recipient of a Lost & Found Archival Research Fellowship and Legacy Fellowship from Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Atterbury holds a full-time lectureship in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and recently curated the Living Room Series for Poetry at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe.

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Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}