"A radiant evocation of longing." —Kirkus Reviews
Please note: this event date was previously scheduled for July 24th.
Third Place Books welcomes poet and essayist Cori Winrock to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her new book, Alterations. Using both textiles and texts — from the first space suits to wedding gowns, from Emily Dickinson to Goodnight Moon — Alterations presents a meditation on mourning and how we bear, imagine, and accommodate loss. Cori is joined in conversation by Anne de Marcken, the Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize–winning author of It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
About Alterations. . .
"In the city where I was born there is a collective of women taking apart donated wedding dresses. Seam ripping and taking off lace, uprooting stitches and unstringing beads—one by one by hand in their spare time."
A collective of women gathers to painstakingly turn wedding dresses into burial garments for infants. "Like many collectives whose existence and skills might seem unfathomable, most of us won't know about them until there is a need to know," writes Winrock. It is when confronted with the loss of her own unborn twin child that Winrock learns of their transformative work and begins to create a garment herself--made of language. Threading together stories of textiles and texts, from the first space suits and the seamstresses who made them, to Emily Dickinson's famous white dress, to the Steinian rhythms of Goodnight Moon, Winrock constructs and reconstructs an essay that might begin to accommodate devastating loss. A work of process and possibility, Alterations enacts the hidden labors of mourning.
Praise for Alterations. . .
"A radiant evocation of longing... Winrock creates a haunting meditation on grief, on being caught in an obsessive circularity of thinking and feeling, and on wishing, achingly, to undo a painful narrative."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Dizzying and deeply felt, this is a memorable account of mourning."
—Publishers Weekly
Cori Winrock is a poet and multimedia essayist. Her book-length essay, Alterations, is part of the Undelivered Lecture series from Transit Books. Her previous book, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, was chosen as Editor’s Choice for the Alice James Book Award. She is the winner of the Boston Review Poetry Prize and her essay on twins was selected as a notable essay in Best American Essays. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, POETRY, the Best New Poets anthology, Bennington Review, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of Interactive Poetics at Western Washington University. (Photo credit: Emily Capisciolto)
Anne de Marcken is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. Winner of the The Novel Prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize, her novel, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, was simultaneously published by New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Giramondo (AU) in 2024, and has since been translated into six languages. She is also author of the lyric novella, The Accident: An Account, and her writing has been featured in Best New American Voices, Brick, Ploughshares, Narrative, The Los Angeles Review, on NPR’s Selected Shorts and elsewhere. Anne lives with her spouse, fellow artist M Freeman, on the unceded land of the Coast Salish people in Olympia, WA, where she runs the innovative small press The 3rd Thing. (Photo credit: Nina Subin)
Want a signed edition of the featured book, but can't make it to the event? Order through our website or over the phone, and write your request for a signature or personalization in the comments field at checkout. Please call the hosting store if you're placing your order within 24 hours of the event.
For media or access inquiries, please email
ZXZlbnRzIHwgdGhpcmRwbGFjZWJvb2tzICEgY29t or call our Lake Forest Park store at (206) 366-3311.
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