A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome three poets to read in the evening of September 30th. In celebration of his new release The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Poet Matthew Tuckner will be joined by fellow poets Jessica Tanck and Nicholas Pierce. Join us for this evening of poetry!
About the book
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a book-length sequence of 53 poems with identical eponymous titles. Heartbreaking and searingly lucid, this debut collection from poet Matthew Tuckner chronicles his best friend's illness and subsequent death from cancer. Its brilliance is not only in recognizing the vastness and particularity of grief — how the loss of a beloved is so personally all encompassing that it splits time irrevocably, separating our personal history into distinct eras of before and after as the governing principles of our lives crumble — but also in joining the discrete experience of one person's sickness to a carcinogenic imperial core, the late-capitalist global order that ensnares all people in toxic landscapes that make us sick.
Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and is currently a PhD student in English/Creative Writing at University of Utah, where he edits Quarterly West. His debut collection of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in Fall 2025. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Adroit Journal, and Best New Poets, among others.
Jessica Tanck is the author of Winter Here (UGA Press, 2024), winner of the 2022 Georgia Poetry Prize. She holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she completed a B.A. in English Literature - Creative Writing and Comparative Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing - Poetry. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, Meridian, New England Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Waxwing, and others. Jess was born in Chicago, IL, but grew up in Sheboygan, WI, on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Nicholas Pierce is the author of In Transit (Criterion Books, 2021), winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared on Best American Poetry’s website and in such journals as 32 Poems, AGNI, The Hopkins Review, Image, Literary Matters, Revel, and Subtropics. He is completing a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where his honors include the Sherman B. Neff Fellowship and the Jeff Metcalf Fellowship in the Humanities.
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