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Virtual Event – Steve Bellin-Oka
March 4, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Magic City Books is proud to welcome Steve Bellin-Oka for a virtual event in celebration of his poetry collection, Instructions for Seeing a Ghost, winner of the 2019 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Joining Steve in conversation will be the poet Cat Batsios.
“Steve Bellin-Oka’s poems hold in balance an intensified language and a passionate voice that bring together the struggles of the inner life with stark realities. This is a book of arresting authenticity.”–Peter Balakian, Pulitzer-Prize winner and judge
This free event will be hosted on the Zoom platform and will stream live on Facebook.
To register in advance for the event, visit: https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ykinF2OKS0aA9nBF9bxdfA
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details about how to join on March 4 at 7:00 CST.
Instructions for Seeing a Ghost is available now at Magic City Books. You can purchase a copy in store or online here: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/instructions-for-seeing-a-ghost/412.
About Instructions for Seeing a Ghost
This poetry collection is the record of an American’s return home after a decade abroad, an exile imposed solely because he loved another man.
In a virtuoso display of lyric and formal inventiveness, Bellin-Oka’s poems meditate on the myriad losses engendered by diaspora: of home, family and sexual identity, and spiritual certainty.
From “Self-Portrait as the Chosen One”:
Long before I was what I am now, short of breath, bald, just returned with arthritic knees from exile in another country’s muck and red volcanic soil, too near-sighted to discern the High Plains tumbleweed from the burning bush of myth, scorched now and silent, long before this, I was the first son my mother bore that lived.
STEVE BELLIN-OKA is the author of a chapbook, Dead Letter Office at North Atlantic Station and is the recipient of a Tulsa Artists Fellowship in poetry. He has taught at the University of Mississippi and Eastern New Mexico University. He lives in Tulsa with his husband.
