Kirun Kapur on "Women in the Waiting Room"

Poet Kirun Kapur discusses her new collection of poetry, "Women in the Waiting Room," with Kyla Hanington of the Prince George's County Human Relations Commission. "Women in the Waiting Room" explores the twin forces of silence and speech. It sketches a room full of women—friends and strangers, humans and goddesses—retuning from the far edges of experience to find a voice.

This fierce, haunting collection asks: in the face of violence or illness, when body and self reach their limit, how can we find a way to speak? Myth tangles with memory, ghazals rub shoulders with inventive fragmentary forms, forging a shape for what feels impossible to say. By way of call and response, echo and reverberation, the many voices of this book create a defiant chorus. In Women in the Waiting Room, Kapur has fashioned poems that speak to our era, rising from pain, moving through silence and into song. "Women in the Waiting Room" was a finalist for the National Poetry Series.

Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry and the Antivenom Poetry Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015). Her second book, Women in the Waiting Room, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares and many other journals. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and Brandeis University, and has been granted fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and McDowell Colony. She was recently named an “Asian-American poet to watch” by NBC news. Kirun serves as Poetry Editor at The Drum Literary Magazine and currently teaches at Amherst College.

Co-presented with the Prince George's County Human Relations Commission.

Borrow the book from PGCMLS: pgcmls.info