Late Night Library

Late Night Library


Elizabeth Onusko – Portrait of the Future with Trapdoor

July 19, 2016

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Kristin Maffei
Featured Guest: Elizabeth Onusko

Purchase Portrait of the Future with Trapdoor and The Prague Winter
Tonight, Kristin speaks with Elizabeth Onusko, author of Portrait of the Future with Trapdoor, a collection of poetry that explores what happens when the body and society each turn on themselves. The book traverses grief, disease, surgery, fertility, mass weddings, mass shootings, fallout, war, abduction, and the gradual collapse of ecosystems — yet the poems are funny, confessional, and self-deprecating with a tinge of the absurd. They have a willingness not to know, to fiercely acknowledge suffering while mounting an escape.
ABOUT OUR FEATURED GUEST:

Elizabeth Onusko is the author of Portrait of the Future with Trapdoor, which received the Bryant-Lisembee Book Prize and was published by Red Paint Hill in April 2016. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Witness, Best New Poets 2015, Conduit, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, and Redivider, among others. Her work has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured on Verse Daily. A founding editor of Guernica, Elizabeth holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in English with a Writing Concentration from Fordham University. She is currently the assistant editor of inter|rupture and lives in New York.