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Poetry! Original music! Free snacks! Good vibes!
Everyone is invited to the launch party for apocalypse blues, a new poetry chapbook by Raya Tuffaha '23. This NPR Tiny Desk-style event will also feature musicians Pablo Famodou '24, Whitney Grinnage-Cassidy '24, and Zivia Lichtenberg '23. Bring your friends for a low-key evening celebrating artists on Swarthmore's campus! 9pm Friday October 28 Kohlberg Commons Swarthmore, PA |
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Raya's new chapbook, apocalypse blues, encounters a speaker looking over a dreary horizon and asks, "What now?" This piece draws on T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," Danez Smith's Don't Call Us Dead, and Franny Choi's Soft Science.
Plan B Press. 2022.
Special thanks to Azura Mizan Tyabji, Bitaniya Giday, and Nathalie F Anderson.
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“Living on the 'threshold of the apocalypse,' Tuffaha spell-bindingly combines legends and the intimate image, collapsing the distance between dread and hope, the personal and myth. Tuffaha grasps for an emergent imagination greater than hope, the certainty that we can mend the fractured world we are damned to inherit."
- Azura Mizan tyabjiDear Azula I Have a Crush on Danny Phantom “apocalypse blues is a whimsical unraveling of what it means to grow comfortable with yourself. Raya playfully weaves storytelling and prose as she navigates the most human experiences; loneliness, loss of personhood, grief, and anger, as each turn of the page sparks an ember guiding us closer to the home within ourselves. These poems are truly the beginning moments of sustenance in the healing process for any person that has been torn down, left hopeless, and abandoned. May these poems be your break of sunshine that restores your faith as it did mine.”
- Bitaniya gidaySeattle Youth Poet Laureate 2020-2021, Motherland |