Alexa Patrick and Simon Shieh for REMEDIES FOR DISAPPEARING and MASTER **IN-PERSON**

Loyalty is so excited to welcome Alexa Patrick and Simon Shieh for an IN-PERSON event celebrating the release of Remedies for Disappearing and Master! Join us at Loyalty's Petworth store at 7 PM ET on Tuesday, October 3rd for a discussion and audience Q&A, followed by a meet + greet & book signing! This event is free to attend but RSVPs are required—please use the form below. **Face masks are required for all attendees in the event space.** Please email events@loyaltybookstores.com with any questions.

ABOUT THE BOOKS

REMEDIES FOR DISAPPEARING: A collection of poetry that moves from family history and the heartbreaks of navigating a predominantly white high school into adulthood, exploring the ways the speaker's experiences echo those of an expansive and intricate history of Black girls and women.

In this beautiful debut from an exciting new poet, Alexa Patrick's Remedies for Disappearing memorializes Blackness in its quiet and unexpected forms, bringing the peripheral into focus. These poems muddy Black life and death, observe lineage and love stories, and question what "disappearing" teaches about Blackness and bodies. 

Remedies for Disappearing is gritty, sharp, and formally inventive, demonstrating Patrick's imaginative curiosity, lyrical restraint, and confidence in her handling of language. Moments of aphoristic confession are balanced with imagistic precision as the speaker recounts the ways her aunties, sisters, and even herself have disappeared in order to survive. 

Patrick's poetry is haunting and hopeful, striving to provide readers with the tools and context to acknowledge, define, and honor the complexity of Black girl/womanhood. Remedies for Disappearing connects Black girls and women to each other and to their own histories, and insists that they be fully and wholly seen.

MASTER: Winner of the 2022 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Terrance Hayes.

The debut collection from Simon Shieh, Master is a stark, surreal, and imagistic reckoning with a traumatic past. Master follows the speaker's struggle with masculinity from a martial arts school in upstate New York to a boxing academy in Beijing. Language emerges in this collection not as a neutral witness to a boy's subjugation, but as the very tool of hegemony, though one which also holds the key to its own undoing, and therefore to freedom. As much as Master is the story of pain, it is also a journey to healing, illuminating that while violence can be our patrimony, it does not have to be our destiny.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Alexa Patrick is a vocalist and poet from Connecticut. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and more. Alexa is currently the Programs Director for Shout Mouse Press. In spring 2023, Alexa made her stage production debut as Un/Sung in the opera We Shall Not Be Moved, directed by Kennedy Center honors awardee Bill T. Jones. You may find her work in publications including The Adroit Journal, CRWN Magazine, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. Her debut collection Remedies for Disappearing will be published by Haymarket Books in June. Visit alexapatrick.com for more.

Simon Shieh is the author of Master (Sarabande Books), selected by Terrance Hayes for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. He has lived in upstate New York and Beijing, China, where he co-founded Spittoon Literary Magazine, which translates the best new Chinese writing into English. From 2008-2014 he competed as an amateur and professional Muay Thai fighter in China, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and the U.S. Simon's poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Guernica, Poetry, The Yale Review, and other publications. His poetry has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Charlotte, and their dog, Momo.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during virtual or in-person events.