Featured Writers: Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia

Distinguished alumni Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia will read their poetry as features of Bowling Green State University’s Winter Wheat Festival of 2022 from November 10th– 12th. 

Remi Recchia

Remi Recchia writes with an unflinchingly graceful and poignant voice that resounds in every line of his poetry. Poems like, “Waking Up from Top Surgery in a Sparse Airbnb Living Room”describe a singular experience with breathtaking emotion: “The hardwood floor/reflects my new watch, large/face swallowing wrist:/a reminder that I am a man.” In other poems, Recchia conveys beautiful intimacy in carefully crafted words, like his poem “Fire Eater, Premolar, Bones,”: “Sometimes when we kiss, I feel your teeth/clink against mine: the quietest champagne/toast. We are not embarrassed anymore when this happens.” His book, Quicksand/Stargazing, a must-read, questions what it means to be a human/animal. 

Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and Reviews Editor for Gasher Journal. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021). His chapbook, Sober, is forthcoming with Red Bird Chapbooks. He lives in Stillwater with his wife.

(biographical information courtesy of https://winningwriters.com/people/remi-recchia)

Roseanna Alice Recchia

Roseanna Alice Recchia’s work rings with voice and power. She has a mastery of image that pervades in every line. In “Bones I Get From My Mother,” Recchia describes: “I know my tongue/is a rounded wasp’s nest/with an egg’s gold finish./Everything inside is humming.” Delicate imagery overlaps with powerful messages, while messages can also be found in every well-crafted line. In another poem, “On Being Fat-Shamed While Out with Your Conventionally Attractive Boyfriend,” Recchia delivers a powerful voice by using a simple situation of ordering food at a restaurant. She writes: “This is just one way of practicing grace,/my mother says—people mostly/mean well and are doing their best/and don’t realize how they sound./I try to play that game too.” Recchia work resounds with a vast array of readers. Check out her poetry collection, Hiding in a Thimble, and her chapbook, Imitating Light.

Roseanna Alice Boswell is a queer poet and educator from Upstate New York. She earned her MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University and is currently working toward her Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. Her debut poetry collection, Hiding in a Thimble, was released with Haverthorn Press in 2021 and she was the winner of Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2021 Chapbook Competition for her manuscript Imitating Light. Roseanna’s research interests include feminist theory, fat studies, and how these two fields speak to femininity and domesticity. She currently lives, writes, and teaches in Stillwater, OK, with her husband and their two cats, Bean and Blossom.

(biographical information courtesy of https://roseannaaliceboswe.wixsite.com/poet/home)

– Caitlyn Mlodzik, MAR

Featured Writer: Leila Chatti

At 7:30pm EST, on Thursday, October 13th, poet Leila Chatti will read her work in Prout Chapel as part of the 2022 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. 

Through her collection Deluge, Leila Chatti chronicles her experience with illness, uncontrollable bleeding referred to as “flooding,” surgery, and remission through explorations of narratives of religious punishment, womanhood, shame, and oscillations of doubt and faith. Fittingly, Chatti’s poems are preoccupied with the grand scope of existence, as we are suspended by our pain and grief between the infinities before birth and after death. “Indeed, one day I will return to God, as it is to Him that I belong.” she writes in her poem “Testimony,” continuing “Indeed, this was part of the Message and the Message was received. / I do not speak for God and He does not speak to me. / This an (arrangement/estrangement). / When asked my religion I answer surrender.” Despite their scope, Chatti roots these poems squarely in the body, allowing worldly pain to evidence the divine; in “Mary in the Waiting Room at the Gynecologist’s office,” she writes “In my hand, an empty cup. / Mary crosses / her legs, fingers the slender / chain around her neck. / She rubs her thumb against / the pendant’s tiny face, his miniature / arms permanently splayed.” Leila Chatti’s poems are as candid as they are intense, and as excruciating in their origins as they are compassionate at their hearts. You absolutely must pick up her work.

—Samuel Burt, MAR

Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. Among her many achievements, she was selected as winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Chatti has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and more. Her debut full-length collection Deluge was published by Copper Canyon in 2020, and you can find her work in The New York Times Magazine, POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and lives and teaches in the Midwest.

(Biographical info and poems courtesy of leilachatti dot com)

Featured Writer: Bianca Stone

At 7:30pm EST, on Thursday, September 29th, poet Bianca Stone will read her work as part of the 2022 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. This event will take place virtually, via Zoom. 

Bianca Stone is a writer and artist from Vermont. She has published several books of poetry and hybrid work including Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief, and What is Otherwise Infinite. In Vermont, Stone teaches on poetry and consciousness, and serves as Creative Director for The Ruth Stone House literary nonprofit and studio. Her poems, essays, and comics may be found in Poetry Magazine, Powder Keg, The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, Conduit, and elsewhere.

Bianca Stone’s work strikes a keen balance between existential woe and items of human scale; her precision, as well as her ability to forge significance through detail, never flags. Her poems frequently wrestle, as many poems do, with what it means “to be,” though Stone’s work sets itself apart from others examining the same questions by nature of its careful attention to, and occupation of, varied existential positions. “It is said this planet came to be / when I was pulled apart,” says God, in her poem “God Searches for God.” And whether embodying God, barbers, or the ego-space of self-realization, Stone uses poetry as a lens through which she looks not at, but through the self. 

That said, these poems do not often linger in overtly heady territory, rooting their questions of belonging and meaningful existence instead in wine bottles, artichokes, and plastic sports apparel. “I thought we fit well in the bottle from the wine club,” Stone writes in “Even Moon,” “though I wasn’t happy with the grape.” It is in these always vivid details where Stone’s eye for poetically expedient gestures toward existential questions is most apparent. However, she also expresses that a cost sometimes accompanies such rapt attention; in “Again Trying to Write a Poem About a B&W Photograph of a Wolf” Stone writes that “at times poetry fills me with loathing / for what cannot be left alone.” Indeed, these poems peel scabs and worry at wounds, making meaning as much from what is in us as the little things which surround us, intriguing us and causing us pain. 

—Samuel Burt, MAR

“And of having felt

like a small event for so long—having felt

like an artichoke, scraped away at with the front teeth,

one scale at a time, worked down

to the meaty heart, but with the ultimate

disappointment of meager flesh—

of being thus, I bet I will live again.”

—From Bianca Stone’s poem “Artichokes”

(Poems and biographical detail courtesy of poetrycomics.org)