Brooklyn Poets Book Launch: Ashley Mabbitt

Join us for the launch of poet Ashley Mabbitt's debut collection of poems, A Self, A Frame, A Look in Through, on Saturday, November 16th, at 144 Montague St and via Zoom! Doors will open for a wine reception for in-person guests at 6 PM and readings will begin at 7 PM. Jennifer Franklin, Marcia Lebeau and Molly Peacock will open for Mabbitt. Book signing to follow.

Note that by attending this event, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy below. All in-person attendees for events are currently required to wear masks (regardless of vaccination status) except readers at a safe distance on stage. We will have masks available. Our full policy can be found at the end of the event description. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of these policies. Thank you for respecting our community.

Closed captions will be available for the event through the Zoom livestream. For more information and to request additional accommodations, contact us at bkp@brooklynpoets.org.

About A Self, A Frame, A Look in Through

Reading Ashley Mabbitt’s gleaming debut collection, A Self A Frame A Look In Through, is like gazing at a Vermeer—and wondering how the artist did it. With her stealth brilliance, she seems to have composed these poems as if she’s quietly placed the clamor of lived life into a camera obscura. In Mabbitt’s hands, tangled experiences of love and disconnection, of history and personal history, of objects and rooms, come to reveal moving, poignant, warmly lit souls. While light angles and shadows underpin, the lines of her poems sort the ambiguities of modern life with hushed understanding and an amused view of the self. A Self, A Frame, A Look In Through is a radiant debut.

—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst: Poems

As the title suggests, a keen ekphrastic impulse sparks many of these poems, which are marked by a scrupulous attention to detail that conjures both Rilke and Moore. Yet Mabbitt, speculative and probing, often expands and transforms ekphrasis, veering suddenly from what she observes into psychological terrains of acute self-awareness, tenderness, or urgency. Conversely, her habit of meticulous description enhances poems of family, memory, objects, and experience, so that a pair of inherited salt and pepper shakers may appear as revelatory as a Rodin. These are thus deftly stealthy poems—that surprise and provoke in the most rewarding way. 

—Jeanne Marie Beaumont author of Letters in Limbo 

Ashley Mabbitt’s debut collection A Self, A Frame, A Look in Through gifts us with a speaker attuned to the most delicate shifts and nuances of the internal and external realms. Psychologically astute and alert, curious and care-filled, Mabbitt’s poems divine the worlds contained within the smallest of objects, the briefest of gestures. And whether imagining themselves into the lost portraits of Velazquez or a forgotten jar of jelly on a refrigerator shelf, they harken to the odd angle, the easily disregarded, the unsaid and undreamed-of—undreamed-of, that is, except by this poet, whose serious, steady looking turns again and again into a generous and capacious seeing, a tender mirror welcoming “great flocks of migrating birds.”

—Kasey Jueds author of Keeper

About the Author

Ashley Mabbitt is the author of A Self, A Frame, A Look in Through (Kelsay Books, 2024) and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Plume, the Ekphrastic Review, Emerge, South Florida Poetry Journal and Summerset Review. She manages a career in scientific journal publishing and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

About the Opening Acts

Jennifer Franklin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023), finalist for the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2023 Julie Suk Award. Franklin has received a Pushcart Prize, a NYFA/City Artist Corps grant, and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. Poems from her new manuscript, A Fire in Her Brain, have been published in the American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, the Common, Poetry Northwest and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. With Nicole Callihan and Pichchenda Bao, she co-edited the Braving the Body anthology (Harbor Editions, 2024). She teaches craft workshops at Manhattanville’s MFA program and 24 Pearl Street of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. For over ten years, she has taught manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she serves as program director.

Marcia LeBeau is a multidisciplinary artist. Her debut poetry collection, A CURIOUS HUNGER (Broadstone Books), was published in April 2024. Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine, New Ohio Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. She was a third-place co-winner of the 2023 Allen Ginsberg Award, longlisted for the 2022 Ralph Angel Prize and received an honorable mention for the Rattle Poetry Prize. Her work has also received several Pushcart Prize nominations. She has an MFA in poetry from VCFA and is the founder of The Write Space, a co-working and event space for creative writers in The Valley Arts District of Orange, New Jersey. She lives with her husband and two sons in South Orange, New Jersey.

Molly Peacock’s latest poetry collection is The Widow’s Crayon Box (W.W. Norton), a book-length sequence of poems that dares to affirm the vast variety of emotional colors in loss and rejuvenation, charting widowhood in the twenty-first century. Her other volumes include The Analyst: Poems, Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems and A Friend Sails in on a Poem, about a 47-year friendship in poetry. The co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses, creator of The Secret Poetry Room at Binghamton University, former Poet-in-Residence at the American Poets Corner and President emerita of the Poetry Society of America, Peacock is also a biographer, author of two books about creativity in the lives of women artists: The Paper Garden and Flower Diary. Her work appears in leading literary magazines, including Poetry and American Poetry Review. She lives in Toronto.

COVID-19 Policy

Effective 2024, all event attendees are required to wear masks due to the current prevalence of cases in NYC. Masks will be available at the door.

The current metrics available, including NYC wastewater data and the CDC’s Respiratory Virus Activity Levels, both indicate high levels of COVID and other illnesses. While your personal risk tolerance may vary, the unmitigated spread of COVID and other respiratory illnesses disproportionately affects the most vulnerable in our community—including those who are immunocompromised or don’t have the privilege of paid sick days to heal and recover. We hope you’ll join us in taking the actions we can to make our space welcoming to all and to keep each other safe. Please stay home if you are experiencing symptoms, have a positive COVID test or someone close to you has recently tested positive.

We strongly encourage daytime visitors and workshop attendees to wear masks. Workshop instructors may choose to enforce a more stringent policy at their own discretion. Additionally, workshop participants may be required to wear masks as an accessibility accommodation for other participants.

While we do our best, Brooklyn Poets cannot guarantee zero risk. A risk of exposure to COVID-19 exists in all public settings. By entering the building, students, teachers and other attendees accept the risk of exposure and knowingly waive and release Brooklyn Poets from any liability related to COVID-19.

Brooklyn Poets Code of Conduct

Brooklyn Poets will not tolerate any instances of discrimination, harassment or abuse in conjunction with any of our programs. Respect and consideration for others, both within and outside our programs, are core values to be upheld by all participants. Discrimination against and/or harassment of community members on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, national origin, religion, age, marital status, veteran status or any other factor is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Program participants are expected to adhere to all federal, state and local laws and regulations. Should a board or staff member, independent contractor, volunteer or program participant be found to violate any aspect of the organization’s code of conduct, Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss them from the program. Consequences may include, but not be limited to, dismissal from the current activity, suspension, ineligibility for all future activities, and/or loss of payment or fees. If you have any issues to report, please do not hesitate to contact anyone on our Conduct Committee and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Interim Director r kay: kay@brooklynpoets.org
Board Director Emily Blair: emiblair@gmail.com
Board Director Miller Oberman: miller.oberman@gmail.com