In-Store: Andrés Cerpa: The Palace w/ Iain Haley Pollock

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
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From Puerto Rico to mythological forests, The Palace charts a family's journey to build a life and home in a world that is often violent and rife with economic instability, as the speaker must also confront his own turbulent past and strive to imagine new ways forward.

Amidst real and imagined landscapes the narrator confronts the specters of his ancestors and ancient gods as the family traverses torn villas and labyrinths. Despite a turbulent history scarred by violence, disenfranchisement, and addiction, a path emerges toward redemption through the speaker's deep engagement with love and the natural world. Still, throughout the speaker grapples with his understanding of change: what can we, and what can't we expect to leave behind in life? What does it mean to move on, to grow?

Marked by solitude and inquisition, the poems of The Palace note the physical nature of their existence as a vehicle for exploring the spiritual. Featuring recurring motifs of the labyrinth, addiction, fecundity, fragility, and future, Cerpa evokes the sense that one can move on from an environment or way of being in the world, but never from oneself. The Palace is a testament of love and transformation, a journey toward splendor in a despairing world.

Andrés Cerpa is the author of two previous books of poetry, Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy (2019) and The Vault (2021), which was longlisted for a National Book Award and celebrated as one of the best poetry books of 2021 by The New York Times. A recipient of a McDowell fellowship, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is an educator and faculty member of the Randolph MFA Program.

Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (2011), Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James, 2018), and All the Possible Bodies (Alice James, 2025). His poems have appeared in publications ranging from American Poetry Review to The New York Times Magazine. Pollock has received several honors for his work including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bim Ramke Prize for Poetry from Denver Quarterly, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. He serves as Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, NY.