Buxton Books is excited to host Joshua Garcia to celebrate the release of his debut poetry collection, Pentimento. This event will feature a reading by John Byrne. This is a free, in-store event. Please email rsvp@buxtonbooks.com to reserve your spot!
About Pentimento:
From an Italian word meaning “to repent,” a pentimento is an instance in painting when traces of an artist’s earlier decisions or mistakes are visible through the final layer(s) of paint. Using modes of confession, ekphrasis, and biblical persona, Pentimento excavates a queerness entangled in one’s faith tradition. Whether seeking to understand his relationship to god, friends, or family, Garcia interrogates questions that arise on the path to self-acceptance. In “Self-Portrait as a Virgin,” a biblical persona asks, “How else are we to take words whole / in our mouths, except as they are given?” Concerned with naming, desire, love, and belonging, Pentimento is a response to a kind of annunciation, the almost supernatural calling of the artist to find words through which the self is free to move.
About Joshua Garcia:
Joshua Garcia’s poetry has appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.
About John Luke Byrne:
John Luke Byrne is a queer writer from Nebraska, currently living in Charleston, South Carolina, where he received his MFA in poetry at the College of Charleston. His work is published in HAD, Rejection Letters, MumberMag, Bending Genres, and elsewhere.