Poetry Reading: Violent Wave by Natasha Mijares

Join us to celebrate the debut poetry collection Violent Wave by Natasha Mijares.

Please join us to celebrate the debut poetry collection Violent Wave by Natasha Mijares. She will be joined for this reading by Robin Reid Drake and Stefania Gomez.

Advance registration is appreciated but not required.

The torrential sensations, forms of matter, literary references, and ecologies of being that feed Natasha Mijares' practice come pouring out in violent wave. As a poet, Mijares holds the sparse page with remarkable potency, using mimesis to move through worlds and push readers into ripples of quiet overwhelm. Her language gathers experiential inputs ranging from earthworms to the interstate, celebrating interrelationships delicately crafted on the page.

The lines themselves perform the action of a violent wave-separating, gathering, and crashing into air, emptiness, and unsettled earth. Like water, the collection attempts to contain everything in its path for inquiry, understanding, and meditation. This book-length poem enlivens a myriad of voices negotiating space, language, and nature while settling into the recognition that change is constant.

Mijares asks readers to linger in the white spaces between phrases and swim in the undercurrents of thought, moving from the microscopic to the mythic. Violent wave is both landscape and journey, inviting the reader to wade through its depths and surface profoundly changed.

Natasha Mijares is an artist, writer, curator, and educator. She is the author of the poetry collection, violent wave (Bridge Books). She received her MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared in Latino Book Review, Allium, New City, Chicago Reader, Gravity of the Thing, Vinyl Poetry, and more.

Robin Reid Drake is a poet and educator who sits too close to the tv. They hold an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they teach in the early college program. Drake’s work has been published by Poetry Foundation, Foglifter Press, Yale University and others.

Stefania Gomez is a 2025 Luminarts Fellow in Poetry, a 2023 Fulbright Research Award Grantee, and a finalist for the 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. She is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and teaches high school English on Chicago's South Side.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which has a wheelchair accessible entrance and bathroom. Masks are strongly encouraged. We have free masks available for everyone at the door, several large air purifiers, and ceiling fans for circulation. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you need a reserved seat, ASL interpretation, or have other access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com (2 weeks notice is required for interpretation).