Downtown Ithaca Alliance Gallery Night Poetry Reading: Mackenzie Berry & SLACK TONGUE CITY

BSB is proud to support local poet Mackenzie Berry for a poetry reading in store and in person as part of Downtown Ithaca Alliance's May 2022 Gallery Night, held on the first Friday of every month. Mackenzie will be joined by members of her Cornell MFA cohort, who will also read from their work. Q&A follows.

About the Book:

Sundress Publications announces the release of Mackenzie Berry’s Slack Tongue City, an ode to Berry’s hometown—Louisville, Kentucky. This debut poetry collection acts as a love letter, paying homage while also tracing the joys and dangers of nostalgia for place. Glasses of bourbon in summer, jug bands, disco balls, and homemade pools quenched from the mouth of a garden hose populate the poems with memories and longing. Slack Tongue City says Louisville is the South because it says it is while simultaneously inviting you to join for supper and see what the syrupy, Kentucky heat is all about. Forget what you think you know about this city—or if you know little, then here is the place to see it through the eyes of someone who loves it dearly. These poems will show you what hides behind the rolling hills. Beyond one city or one region, Slack Tongue City also draws the reader through poems that include the rituals of girlhood via a speaker who, even though they may leave, will never fully be removed from their hometown.

About the Poet:

Mackenzie Berry is the author of Slack Tongue City (Sundress Publications, 2022), which traces  her hometown—Louisville, Kentucky—the South, place, girlhood, and grief. Her poetry has been published in Vinyl, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart, Blood Orange Review, and TAUNT, a Louisville-based publication, among others. A graduate of the University of  Wisconsin-Madison through the First Wave Program and Goldsmiths, University of London, she is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Cornell University. Her website is mackenzieberry.com.

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