Visiting Author - Elizabeth Zaleski - The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure

Date and Time

• Saturday, Apr 18, 2026  4:30pm - 5:30pm

Location

Category

Arts

Details

With excitement, Francie & Finch welcomes you to join us for a visit from author Elizabeth Zaleski! She will be presenting her new book of personal essays, The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure and writes about the book, “If you’ll bear with me, we’re going to get a bit technical. And then, I promise, it will all start to matter.”

About the Book:
Whether failing to restrain herself from trying to find greater meaning in roadkill, or to convince her dad that psychedelic mushrooms will not save his marriage, or to believably perform enthusiasm for her teammates, Elizabeth Zaleski is trying hard and failing spectacularly, and thankfully, she takes us along for the ride.

Funny, intimate, and candid, The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure debuts an exciting new voice. From growing up in a quirky family in rural northeast Ohio and attending a Mennonite high school as a lapsed Catholic to struggling to get over a particularly well-endowed lover and suffering intestinal calamity while searching for closure, Zaleski’s stories are at once captivating in their singularity and recognizable in their truthfulness. Fans of Tim Kreider and Sloane Crosley will appreciate Zaleski’s levity and wit as she takes aim at such time-honored institutions as pet ownership and gives clear-eyed dispatches from the no man’s land that is an HPV diagnosis.

As Zaleski writes, “If you’ll bear with me, we’re going to get a bit technical. And then, I promise, it will all start to matter.”

About the Author:
Elizabeth Zaleski is the author of The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure. Elizabeth grew up in rural northeast Ohio, in Amish country. After living and traveling all over the US, she now lives in slightly less rural northeast Ohio, outside Akron. She works as an editor and is the curator of GreatFartsofLiterature.com. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Hippocampus, The Normal School, and The Missouri Review.

Praise for The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure:
“Funny and introspective. . . . Wit and intelligence shine through the prose.” —Julia Dillman, Foreword Reviews

“I read an advanced copy of Elizabeth Zaleski’s The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure based on a single newsletter sent out from her publisher at Belt, Anne Trubek. It’s a delight to pick up a book by a writer totally unknown to you and finish it in a single day.” —Austin Kleon, NYT-bestselling author of Steal Like an Artis

“Softly deviant, . . . [Zaleski’s] collection of essays on failure is charming and frank and disproves my hypothesis that publishers only release personal essay collections by the world’s dullest people. Zaleski: not dull! An oddball from rural Ohio with a crazy family who writes what I always wanted ‘alt lit’ to be: the lucid prose of an original mind living an unconventional life. . . . It is the type of book destined to be ignored by the few remaining reviewing organs, and everything about it is hostile to any conceivable algorithm. So, vote with your dollars!” —Molly Young, former book critic for the NYT, book recommender extraordinaire, and maker of many cool things

“Turns breakups, lost faith and literary letdowns into sharply funny reflections on failure. . . . I would call the score-keeping unhealthy if it weren’t so funny[, but] I must admire the courage Zaleski provides in her unsparing honesty.” —Brendan Tynan Buck, Newcity Lit