Sean Bishop, Su Smallen, and Kara Condito read from their new poetry

Sean Bishop’s poetry debut details the death of the speaker's father after brain surgery, confronting personal and political grief.

“This book is an essential, thrilling ride, which has the feeling of being inevitable. We enter into this book alert to possibility, and leave knowing how asleep we’ve been.”—Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Reenactments

“The Night We’re Not Sleeping In is a collection of hauntings. From the companionship of black holes to the loss of a parent to the regenerative power of killing, old wounds are reconfigured, old griefs polished until they shine. Sean Bishop dredges up the light that lies hidden at the bottom of the void.”--Quan Barry, author of She Weeps Each Time You’re Born

Sean Bishop’s poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, jubilat, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. He has an MFA from the University of Houston and coordinates the programs in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin.

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In Su Smallen’s newly expanded Buddha, Proof, Buddha befriends Barbie, shops at Target, rides roller coasters, considers a career change, and contemplates the complete perfection of toast. With this Minnesota Book Award Finalist collection, now containing twice as many poems, author Su Smallen honors the center, not-center of Buddhism with humor and gravity.

Su Smallen is the author of Buddha, Proof, a Minnesota Book Award Finalist, and Weight of Light, nominated for the Pushcart Press Editor’s Book Award. Other honors include the Jane Kenyon Prize and Poet in Residence for the Science Museum of Minnesota’s St. Croix Watershed Research Station. Su was a founding member of the Laurel Poetry Collective, publishing books and broadsides for ten years. Formerly a professional choreographer and dancer, Su and her poetry were featured in the documentary dance film Klatch. Currently, she is an editor at the University of Minnesota Law School Institute on Crime and Public Policy and director of the writing center at St. Olaf College. Visit www.susmallen.com for more information.

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Spectator has a subversive heart: a series of poems about a Mexican and an American in love. These ravenous poems cross many emotional and aesthetic borders. They're surreal, tender, meta, political, impressionistic, and angry. Kara Candito has enlarged the contemporary love poem. This is vital and startling work."--Eduardo Corral

Kara Candito is a creative writing professor at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville, and a cocurator of the Monsters of Poetry reading series in Madison, Wisconsin. She is the recipient of scholarships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Council for Wisconsin Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the Santa Fe Arts Institute. Her work has been published in numerous journals and her first poetry collection, "Taste of Cherry," won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.