Visiting Poets - Tyler Michael Jacobs & Maria Nazos

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• Saturday, Jun 28, 2025  4:30pm - 5:30pm

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Join us as we welcome Tyler Michael Jacobs and Maria Nazos! Both of these talented poets will be reading from their newest works. We can't wait to see you there!

ABOUT THE BOOKS:
PULSE cuts open arteries of a troubled world and inspects what makes us bleed, suffer, and perish. It demonstrates how we overcome difficulties, even when it hurts to breathe. PULSE interrogates the personal, from the loss of friends to cancer, and the Republican party, to hate crimes, and mass shootings, including that of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub. The poems examine the life force that continues to beat relentlessly through a fragmented world. It seeks out the tiny music of our bodies that continues to pulse, breathe, and regenerate, even through grief and loss. From Provincetown beaches and Costa Rican crab shacks, to Midwestern plains, and a Tampa nightclub, the collection rides a carousel of madness, redemption, and love.

In The Weight of Drought, Jacobs reaches toward the natural world with compassion, nudging the muzzle of a horse with the back of his hand, bottle-feeding an abandoned calf, and watching chickens take flight; to get there, these poems must acknowledge the cruelty of the natural world, the relationship between drought and flood, and question what meaning lies behind dying. With landscapes and intimacy, these poems capture what it means to connect by digging in the soil, feeding another, and holding. Through devotions, pastorals, and still lifes, The Weight of Drought looks at the duality of beauty and ugliness, love and violence to explore what it means to be whole.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Maria Nazos is a Greek American poet raised in Athens. Kaveh Akbar chose her work as a Palette Poetry Contest winner. Her poetry, translations, and essays are published in The New Yorker, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She’s the author of PULSE (forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2026) and the translator of A Slow Horizon that Breathes (World Poetry Books, 2023), a collection of poems from Greek poet Dimitra Kotoula. She has worked every job imaginable, including a disastrous, three-day stint as a table dancer in Mykonos. She quit after she realized she had lost too many friends. Find her at www.marianazos.com.

Tyler Michael Jacobs is the author of The Weight of Drought (Stephen F. Austin State University Press) and Building Brownville (Stephen F. Austin State University Press). His words have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, Variant Literature, Plainsongs, Pidgeonholes, Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere. His poems have also been featured on Nebraska Public Media’s Friday LIVE. He received his MFA from Bowling Green State University.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOKS:
Advance praise for “PULSE” and other works

“I love the journey this poet takes me on, the fullness of its vision. Granular to cosmic, miraculous, magical thinking to an egg balancing on a single nail. The poem feels subtly but densely peopled, too. It’s its own ecosystem, this love.”  —Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of the novel Martyr! and poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell

“Luscious psalms to divine recklessness, the poems in Maria Nazos's PULSE wear their formal brilliance lightly, leaping and pirouetting with raw, gritty grace and a clear-eyed love of our human brokenness, from which they never flinch. A marvel.”  –-Joy Castro, author of One Brilliant Flame, Flight Risk, and Island of Bones

Maria Nazos in PULSE has written for the world a seismic, incandescent tribute to life. It is devotional with a ferocious tenderness. Here is a poet who can and has resurrected ghosts in our veins—the parents destined to drown in quiet despair, and the lovers who linger like bruises. This collection doesn’t flinch from darkness or the suffocating weight of grief. Yet Nazos transforms pain into a strange, stubborn grace. From the cliffs of Delphi to the cornfields of Nebraska, she maps a world where history bleeds into the present. Her voice is both elegy and rebellion, hymn and rhyme. To read PULSE is to touch the “dirty human sweetness” of existence itself: flawed, forgiving, and furiously alive.” —Saddiq Dzukogi, author of Your Crib, My Qibla and Bakandamiya: An Elegy

Advance praise for The Weight of Drought

“The Weight of Drought is an exploration of emptiness as the prerequisite of creation. It is the place in which ‘idea’ (often synonymous with longing) acts as a generating force, not unlike light, water, dirt. This is the bravest kind of poetry because it has to work with almost nothing—a whisper, a gesture, a world of shadows and dearth; it is a ‘drought’ aesthetic that can’t rely on the vivacity of words. The poet must find ‘weight’ in the barest semblance of song, much as a mime must communicate solid, technicolored structures with apparitions and signs. And yet, as Jacobs’s labor unfolds across these pages like a blossom-cathedral, we know we are floating with the divine, receiving the first breath, the starter seed of everything, where ‘what you love takes shape/inside your chest’ and demands that you live.” —Larissa Szporluk, author of Virginals

“In The Weight of Drought, Tyler Michael Jacobs reconsiders the word ‘landscape’ as relentlessly inclusive. Yes, the reader will find the blurry fields of the horizon here, but also the innumerable petals of previously unknown plants, the spit from a grasshopper’s mouth, the yearning ghosts of horses and fathers. Whether Jacobs is excavating a core memory or illuminating the silence of a present moment, love and loss are bonded at the center of each poem, and despite having a keen sense of place and human experience, many of these poems float in the dreamlike realm of ‘if.’ Jacobs has the nerve to write about the ‘soul’ and of ‘God,’ but always in the context of yearlings or flowers or Fords. This book is sinewy, deeply observant, heartfelt—and it has the rust and dirt and sky of the Great Plains and the Midwest planted in its bones.” —Dan Rzicznek, author of Settlers

“So much sky in this book, so much earth and water. And what between? Snow, rain, their absence. The weight of drought is distance, is loneliness, is emptiness. In this book, Tyler Michael Jacobs reminds us how to fill such silent spaces: with singing, with dreaming, with care, with faith that our prayers will lead to green fields. Yes, the world is burning and barren, but these poems are an incantation against harm: a call to pay attention to the fragile beauty around us lest we lose it.” —Amorak Huey, author of Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy