Jane Huffman Reads Public Abstract

Winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Jane Huffman’s intricate debut collection, Public Abstract, examines illness and recovery, loss and addiction: the ripples of influence an addict has on their family circle, and vice versa. We watch as a private mind, devoted to its privacy, is laid out on the page and abstracted to become a public revelation. Building an aesthetic of compressed interiority, the speaker’s tension is clear—“From one lung, I tell the truth. / From the other lung, I lie.” Through intimate and meticulous poems, Public Abstract explores the operations of form, sewn together, and the failings of form, ripped apart. Crumbling under its own weight and folderol, form becomes an act of invention and in Huffman’s expert hands, revision becomes a genre.

Jane Huffman’s debut collection, Public Abstract, won the 2023 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Jane is a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Denver and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Online at www.janehuffman.com

 

An experience in deep listening, each Whole Cloth Reading Series event features a single poet who reads an entire book of poems from cover to cover. While poets devote immense craft to shaping a book, public readings tend to favor selections and excerpts. Uniting writer and audience in a celebration of expansive and unhurried attention, this series creates a rare environment for the investigation of poetry, sound, delivery and reciprocity. Each event features a transformative (short!) book and concludes in time for a cordial reception and conversation.

Series Conveners: Elee Kraljii Gardiner, poet; Bronwen Tate, Creative Writing