Iowa City Book Festival presents Jennifer L. Knox @ Prairie Lights

Jennifer L. Knox presents Crushing It at Prairie Lights. Part of the Iowa City Book Festival. From the organizers:
The poems in Jennifer Knox’s darkly imaginative collection, Crushing It, unearth epiphanies in an unbounded landscape of forms, voices and subjects―from history to true crime to epidemiology―while exploring our tenuous connections and disconnections. From Merle Haggard lifting his head from a pile of cocaine to absurdist romps through an apocalypse where mushrooms learn to sing, this versatile collection is brimming with dark humor and bright surprise. Alongside Knox’s distinctive surrealism, Crushing It also reveals autobiography in poems about love, family, and adult ADHD, and Knox’s empathetic depictions of the ego’s need to assert its precious, singular “I” suggest that a self distinct from the hive, the herd, the flock, is an illusion. With clear-eyed spirit, Crushing It swallows all the world, and then some.

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of four books of poems: Days of Shame & Failure (Bloof Books, 2015), The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway (Bloof, 2010), Drunk by Noon (Bloof, 2007), and A Gringo Like Me (Soft Skull Press, 2005, Bloof, 2007). Known for their dark, imaginative humor, her poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, four times in the Best American Poetry series, and the 2022 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Jennifer grew up in Lancaster, California—home to Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, and the Space Shuttle. She studied film and glassblowing at Alfred University, then earned BA in English at the University of Iowa, where she attended the undergraduate Writer’s Workshop. She earned her MFA from New York University. Her honors include three Milwaukee Poetry Slam champion titles and an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship for her crowdsourced poetry project, Iowa Bird of Mouth. Jennifer lives in central Iowa, where she teaches at Iowa State University and in a series of private poetry writing classes online.