Poetry Spotlight: Isabelle Baafi and John McCullough

Two award-winning poets – one emerging with a debut collection, the other returning with their fifth – explore identity, togetherness and separation, and the human search for joy, in two of the most feted and anticipated poetry books of the last year. Join in-person or watch from home on Zoom.

Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good is a journey of self-discovery and reclamation in the wake of divorce, exploring the transformative journey of redefining one’s identity following trauma and upheaval. It interrogates how much our identity is determined by the circumstances into which we are born.

John McCullough’s Crowd Voltage addresses yearnings for community, probing fragmentation and disturbances within the body of the crowd and the crowd of the body. Engaging with working-class and queer experiences, the poems move between solitude and togetherness, haunted by ghosts from history as they dream of unity and discover joy in deserted corners.