Looking forward to a beautiful fall weekend of books, food trucks, and downtown fun in Nashville at the Southern Festival of Books:

Memory, Museum, Muse: Poems
Bridgette Bates, Patricia Waters, Sandy Longhorn
Saturday, October 10, 11:00-12:30 pm
Conf Room 3, Nashville Public Library

Thank you to the Poetry Society of America for including me in their lovely about-a-poem series:

On an excerpt from What Is Not Missing Is Light

In the past, we traveled to unknown cities, loaded our cameras with a roll of film, smiled and said “cheese,” hoping a set of 24 photographs would expose a beautiful  journey. Time and time again, I returned home from such trips eager to see what images I had captured, and upon developing my photos was surprised to find I had taken significantly more pictures of unknown pieces of art from inside a museum than of the usual landmarks and landscapes. Perhaps subconsciously I was attempting to preserve my own experience in a larger history of art and artifacts… READ THE POST.

What Is Not Missing Is Light
(Rescue Press, 2014) 

Recently, Publishers Weekly reviewed What Is Not Missing Is Light:

“Bates, in a debut collection of untitled prose poems, meditates on statutes, Greek mythology, museums, the oceans, motherhood, and femininity. She begins by examining her primary subject, “a statue, an inescapable she,” and threads together her diverse array of subjects with a singular and piercing focus. Bates is transfixed by the role of museums; the statues and the experience of being in the museum space work as a stepping-stone for self-discovery: “A cemetery/ a sea/ a museum// Places where the body floats free in a buried form.” The poems are reflective and inward-looking; she writes, for instance, “We are all survivors of ruin. And isn’t ruin beautiful because it has survived?” Often, however, this intimate excavation of self adopts a distant, detached, and clinical tone. So while the poet can feel far from her work, the poems’ authoritative coolness perfectly reflect the quiet museum-going experience; each poem in the collection gleams like marble statuary. Bates’s writing is taut and elegant, without superfluous ornamentations. But she is also a witty writer concerned with the genealogy of language and its implications, proclaiming, “If the plural of marble, marbles, is slang for sanity, then what does it mean to get lost in a room of marble statues?” Bates’s thoughtful poems offer a new means of exploring art and origins. (Nov.)”

Before I take a non-existent spring break, I’m excited to have a few readings on the horizon this spring. One in Minneapolis with fellow Rescue Press authors as part of an off-site event at AWP, and two coming up in Los Angeles.

For the second month in a row, over at Small Press Distribution, What Is Not Missing Is Light has made January’s bestselling list along with the good company of fellow Rescue Press comrade, Lauren Haldeman’s Calenday!

Thanks to everyone at Parnassus Books in Nashville for welcoming me home.

It was a wonderful night of family, friends, former teachers, and new faces. And an extra thanks to everyone for making my book a bestseller in The Tennessean.

This Thursday, I’m ringing in the new year at the Last Bookstore Downtown. Please join me for my LA book book release and a hundred mini cupcakes!