Left Bank Books welcomes poets Stacey Lynn Brown and Cassie Donish, who will sign and read from their newest collections, “The Shallows” and “The Year of the Femme,” at this special event in celebration of National Poetry Month!

This event is free and open to the public, but proof of purchase of any of the poets’ featured titles from Left Bank Books will be required to enter the signing line.

In “The Shallows,” Stacey Lynn Brown continues her potent exploration of the American South—its complex legacies of family and race. These harrowing yet ultimately hopeful new poems depict a daughter grappling with the aftermath of her father’s massive stroke and her own concurrent struggles with a debilitating and mysterious illness. Stacey Lynn Brown is also the author of “Cradle Song,” a book-length poem, and is the co-editor, with Oliver de la Paz, of “A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry.” She teaches creative writing at Indiana University in Bloomington.

“At the edge of a field a thought waits,” writes Cassie Donish in “The Year of the Femme,” her collection that explores the conflicting diplomacies of body and thought while stranding us in a field, in a hospital, on a shoreline. These are poems that assess and dwell in a sensual, fantastically queer mode. Here is a voice slowed by an erotics suffused with pain, quickened by discovery. In masterful long poems and refracted lyrics, Donish flips the coin of subjectivity; different and potentially dangerous faces are revealed in turn. With lyricism as generous as it is exact, Donish tunes her writing as much to the colors, textures, and rhythms of daily life as to what violates daily life—what changes it from within and without.