Natalie Eilbert is aBrooklyn-based poet, whose work has appeared in Tin House and Guernica, among other publications. She’s just finished her first chapbook,Conversations with the Stone Wife, and will be reading selections to celebrate the debut. If you’re not an aspiring poet and have no idea what a “chapbook” is, the word refers to a small selection of poetry, often saddle-stitched into a manuscript, making it more amenable to a small print-run. Chapbooks frequently focus on one theme, circling around a central image. In Eilbert’s case, that image is supplied by the Venus of Willendorf, a nubile late-Paleolithic statuette found in Austria over a century ago. The poet uses the fleshy figurine as a starting point for meditations on body dysmorphia and the history of food issues, producing poems that are “artifacts of neuroses.” Read an extract here. Eilbert will be ably supported by Morgan Parker, Monica McClure and May-Lan Tan.
natalie filbert
Spymaster Secrets, Library Porn, and Broad City-Style Comedy
This week’s talks and readings: some heavy stuff, ending in laughs.
Wednesday, July 30
The Gatekeepers Screening
When The Gatekeepers was first released in 2012, NY Times film critic A.O. Scott recognized the Israeli documentary’s import. “It is hard,” he wrote, “to imagine a movie about the Middle East that could be more timely, more painfully urgent, more challenging to conventional wisdom on all sides of the conflict.” Several years later, as the war in Gaza stretches into its third week with no signs of abating, that urgency has if anything only become more pronounced. More →