Authors Chris George and Robin Myrick will present work from their recently published debut collections: The Occultation (fiction) and I Am This State of Emergency (poetry).
This event is free; RSVP HERE.
Chris George is the son of the expanses of semi-rural Texas. He is an admirer of all things overgrown and left alone, and the ordinary folk who inhabit his native land. He currently lives in Dallas, where he teaches and writes. The Occultation is his first book.
Robin Myrick is a conceptual and experimental artist working in photography, writing, and hybrid forms. Her projects often engage the transitory nature of the mediated moment, as expressed through television and film, portraiture and the body, and the rhetoric of identity, politics, consumerism, and disaster. She holds an MFA in Writing and Critical Studies from California Institute of the Arts. I Am This State Of Emergency is her first book.
Surveyor Books is a Dallas-based publisher of first books by first-time authors.
Praise for Chris George’s The Occultation
“In Chris George’s tales, a uniformly flat and sordid world is refined to a point of strange translucence through which other worlds, both wonderful and terrible, are glimpsed. With things reduced to such a state of lowest energy, lowest spiritual possibility, all it takes is the slightest, deftest flip of the language to deflect, to redirect, and to suggest some fearful joy beneath the surface. This is raw and fearful stuff.” — David Searcy
“In a forgotten alley, past a door with a broken padlock, through the dark of a closet that never ends, you’ll find a Chris George story. The Occultation tantalizes at every turn. With an unflinching eye, George hacks through the weeds of a North Texas long overlooked in the popular imagination, where the ghosts have secrets and keep them, too.” — Simon Han
“I loved these sharp, haunting vignettes from the end of the world. They are linked but open, both mysterious and familiar, with an eerie, distilled, and alluringly ambiguous quality. The Occultation showcases that rare combination of style and substance.” — Lindsay Lerman
Praise for Robin Myrick’s I Am This State of Emergency
“Robin Myrick reckons with the ruin/s of nation, of critical thinking, of radical empathy, of necessary discomfort and discord. And yet, this book is nothing if not loud, marked by polyvocal prose, contrapuntal verse: omnipresence and hyper-mediation as our lingua franca in Post Internet culture. Harnessing a docupoetics that returns poetry to the street, to the town hall meeting, to language as a state of emergence and exigency, I Am This State of Emergency asks us to consider listening as a poetics and a political praxis. Informed by information theory’s foundational tenet, this is a book that takes noise as more than necessary; as narrative itself.” — Chris Campanioni
“I Am This State of Emergency turns up the volume on the nightmarish soundscape of contemporary American politics, spurring us to listen and listen hard to where we are and what we have become. Myrick’s endlessly innovative poems transfigure the collective transcript of our last decade, showing us what better things we can do with words. ‘The only way out is out,’ she insists, and with this collection, points us towards the exits. A labor of love for the body politic, and a powerful, arresting debut.” — Janet Sarbanes
“In the making of her debut collection of poems, I Am This State of Emergency, Robin Myrick set out to listen closely to the kind of person most unwilling to do the same, the politically divided argumentative American. The resulting document of this deep listening experiment is in poem form, organized by playlist. Bouncing from ‘I’ to ‘I’ across the political spectrum, an opposing, despicable ‘you’ is always in view. Myrick has brilliantly imploded the bumper sticker stick-it-to-em, unearthing the true slogans of our time: a puzzle of contradictions, double standards, ironies — even thinly concealed hurt — and a devotion to the divide itself. Angry voter tirades are blasted open, pulled apart, taken to their logical conclusion, and smartly juxtaposed, each poetic turn an uncomfortable revelation inciting laughter, horror, and contemplation. It’s precisely in Myrick’s unwavering attentiveness to the us vs. them rhetoric that these poems point us elsewhere, lead us to unexpected places — if only America could quiet down and pay attention and listen like Myrick does. Ultimately, these poems prove that it’s in the act of listening and in the necessity for poetry that we can get ourselves out of this predicament. These poems are their own kind of protest, and I’d love to have any part of them on the bumper of my car.” — Stephen Van Dyck
Don’t miss out and sign up to our newsletter 
