Arts + Literature Laboratory welcomes the 2025 Wisconsin Book Festival for four poetry events on Saturday, October 25, 2025. You can find a complete schedule of events at the Wisconsin Book Festival website.
Local poets Kiyoko Reidy and Lily Somenson and will present the first program of the day at 3:00pm.
Reidy’s Black Holes and Their Feeding Habits illuminates worlds that are exquisite, shimmering, made tender by awe and grief. The poems breathe portals into familial care, inherited violence, intergenerational loss, annd the natural landscapes within and around us. We encounter “monarch wings resplendent ans church windows”, an obaasan laying flowers at a cemetery; oranges like “fist sized fires alight / in the branches”, a bodily desire to “borderless in the wild dark.” In the wisdom of these poems, there lives a keen recognition of the self shape-shifting toward the light. Reidy’s lush attention to care teach us to open ourselves to the world “wildly, marveling at all this abundance.”
In Mistaken for Loud Comets, Someson intertwines experiences around incarceration, queerness, and the Black body in America. Someson’s poetic genius can be felt in her fortitude—she embraces the storm with startling empathy, and within these poems, offers up her most vulnerable moments alongside her most resolute proclamations of selfhood, claiming space on the page as if fighting for her birthright. Exploring the outermost limits of identity with a gentle, inquiring mind, Someson lets the poems in mistaken for loud comets be “everything/ all at once.”
