Worldly Things By Michael Kleber-Diggs with Juliet Patterson

Register Now so you can join us via Zoom check it out on our YouTube Channel after the event.

For news from the store, including updates on our events, join our newsletter mailing list.

Worldly Things

From now on, if someone asks me why I'm never moving away from Saint Paul I'm just going to hand them a copy of "Worldly Things". Michael captures the nuances of our black and brown community here with unfiltered authenticity. 

— Riley

"Sometimes," writes Michael Kleber-Diggs in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, "everything reduces to circles and lines."

In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love--teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics--couple with moments of wrenching grief--a father's life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother's waist; Freddie Gray's death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor.

But Worldly Things refuses to "offer allegiance" to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. "Let's create folklore side-by-side," he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. "All of us want," after all, "our share of light, and just enough rainfall."

Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward--toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

Order Your Copy From Next Chapter Booksellers 

ISBN: 9781571315168

About The Author:

Michael Kleber-Diggs was born and raised in Kansas and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, the Rumpus, Rain Taxi, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Water Stone Review, Midway Review, North Dakota Quarterly and a few anthologies. Michael teaches poetry and creative nonfiction through the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.

Juliet Patterson was recently named a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry, Juliet Patterson is the author of two full-length books, Threnody, (Nightboat Books) and the Lambda Award finalist The Truant Lover (Nightboat Books). Her poems and essays have appeared widely in numerous magazines, and she’s also published two chapbooks (one prose and one poetry): Epilogue (Spout Press) and Dirge (Albion Books). Her most recent writing project—a memoir in progress entitled Sinkhole—was a 2017 finalist for a Loft-McKnight Award and is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.

For more information about events at Next Chapter Booksellers, please contact

Riley Davis--riley@nextchapterbooksellers.com

A complete schedule of our upcoming events is always available at www.nextchapterbooksellers.com.

# # #