Join us as we welcome Rebecca Morgan Frank and Simone Muench in celebration of Frank’s new collection Oh You Robot Saints!, published this February by University of Chicago Press. The launch will include a preview of composer Mara Gibson’s “The Clockmaker’s Doll,” based on a poem in Oh You Robot Saints! and performed and recorded by voice and saxophone duo Megan Ihnen & Alan Theisen present… for their next touring production Black Meridian.

Register for free for a link to attend this virtual launch to be emailed to you the day of the event.

Part bestiary, part litany, part elegy, Rebecca Morgan Frank’s Oh You Robot Saints! is populated by a strange menagerie of early automata and robots, including octobots and an eighteenth-century digesting duck, set alongside medieval mechanical virgins and robot priests. From a riveting robobee sonnet sequence that links weapons of war and industrial fixes for infertility to a microdrama sketching out a missing Sophocles play on the mythical bronze man, Talos, these muscular poems blur and sing the lines between machines and the divine. This lyrical exploration of the ongoing human desire to create life navigates wonder and grief, joining the uncanny investigation of what it is to be, to make, and to be made.

You can purchase Oh You Robot Saints! and support Pilsen Community Books, Chicago’s only worker owned and operated independent bookstore, here. Thanks for helping make excellent free programming like this possible!

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of three previous titles, including two published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Little Murders Everywhere, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.

Simone Muench is the author of several books including Orange Crush (Sarabande), Wolf Centos (Sarabande), and Suture (Black Lawrence), sonnets co-written with Dean Rader. Most recently, she co-edited They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence). A recipient of an NEA poetry fellowship and a Meier Foundation for the Arts Award, she is a professor at Lewis University where she oversees Jet Fuel Review. She is also a poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Her collaborative chapbook, Hex & Howl, co-written with Jackie K. White, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, 2021.