Join us for the next meeting of the Violet Hour Book Club, a reading group devoted to modern and classic works of LGBTQ literature.

The book we will be discussing is The New Testament (2014) by Jericho Brown.

We are going online for the next few book club meetings. It will take place online with Zoom, a remote video conferencing service. Address to be announced in the days before the event.

To download Zoom on your computer, visit https://zoom.us/

ABOUT THE BOOK ///

Jericho Brown’s The New Testament is a devastating meditation on race, sexuality and contemporary American society by one of the most important voices in US poetry, and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

‘To read Jericho Brown’s poems is to encounter devastating genius.’ – Claudia Rankine.

In poems of immense clarity, lyricism and skill, Brown shows us a world where disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighbourhood, and trauma runs through generations. Here Brown makes brilliant and subversive use of Bible stories to address the gay experience from both a personal and a political perspective. By refusing to sacrifice nuance, no matter how charged and urgent his subject, Brown is one of the handful of contemporary poets who have found a speech adequate to the complex times in which we live, and a way to express an equivocal hope for the future.

The New Testament was winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence.

Hosted by Christopher DiRaddo

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Our future book club titles and dates:

August 22: Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
September 19: My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci
October 10: The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal
October 31: Break in Case of Emergency by Brian Francis
November 21: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
December 12: A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Consider joining the Violet Hour Book Club group.