An Afternoon of New Poetry with Esther Lin, Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, & Jinmin Seo

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. She was also a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a 2017–2019 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.

Eduardo Martínez-Leyva was born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican immigrants. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Boston Review, The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Lambda Literary Foundation, along with a teaching fellowship from Columbia University, where he earned his MFA. He was the writer-in-residence at St. Alban’s School for Boys in Washington, DC, and teaches and resides in New York City. Cowboy Park won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from University of Wisconson Press and was also featured in Publishers Weekly’s fall 2024 adult preview.

Jimin Seo was born in Seoul, Korea and immigrated to the US to join his family at the age of eight. He earned his MFA from Columbia University and BA from Florida State University. He is the author of OSSIA, a winner of The Changes Book Prize judged by Louise Glück. His poems can be found in Action Fokus, The Canary, LitHub, Pleiades, mercury firs, and The Bronx Museum. His most recent projects were Poems of Consumption with H. Sinno at the Barbican Centre in London, and a site activation for salazarsequeromedina’s Open Pavilion at the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

Priase for the Books

“OSSIA is thrillingly alive. There’s an inventive daring at work in the lines that feels at times like a song, at times like the voice in your head, telling you about yourself and others, everything you do and don’t want to know. One part intimate self-regard, one part provocation, this lyric extension of a conversation between friends, between mentor and mentee, the living and the dead, lover and beloved, pursues a series of renewals as the poet offers the poems in Korean and English, hoping to include all of the registers of his feelings. The result is a gorgeous game of language and poetry, conducted for the highest stakes: love.”

–ALEXANDER CHEE, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Abounding with ghost and animal voices, Jimin Seo’s OSSIA makes a radiant and enchanting debut that musically oscillates between Korean and English. There is a mythological tone that permeates the collection, that tells and retells themes of death, birth, and rebirth mainly in the form of letters and incantatory address. One does not need Korean reading ability to fully relish in the linguistic prowess and hypnotic imagination of this collection. And yet, it is impressive how the bilingual presentations of poems invite stimulating questions of how and when images and figures are conjured and transformed amidst processes of revision/re-vision—adding to our meditation on the book’s themes while positioning the act of translation as a rich, creative, and spiritual act of communication. I am eager to witness this book to cast its luscious spell on both Korean and English–speaking literary communities.”

–EMILY JUNGMIN YOON, author of Find Me as the Creature I Am

“In this deeply felt, erotically charged debut, Martínez-Leyva leads readers through a poet’s carefully built interior world in which he braids together tenderness and violence, action and passivity, the unsayable with the sung…The cowboys here are objects of love or desire, ciphers, lost boys, new versions of a hard-won self, and Cowboy Park is a rewarding, memorable book from an important new voice in American poetry.” —Mark Wunderlich