BGSQDBureau of General Services—Queer Division
BGSQD
Join us for celebrating Zefyr Lisowski’s debut poetry collection, GIRL WORK, out from Noemi Books, with a short reading and conversation with poet and novelist John Manuel Arias.
GIRL WORK, a book-length meditation on sexual violence and feminized labor, centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender- nonconforming self in our current political moment. Written in injunctions to the self, to past assailants, and to friends, GIRL WORK challenges canonical representations of pain as punitive, redemptive, or separable from the environmental conditions it springs from. Throughout GIRL WORK, a self is restored from the detritus of memory—flashes of sexual violence, pop cultural touchstones like the movie The Ring, the music of Ke$ha, the sudden death of a father, the paintings of Henry Darger, and more. Winner of the 2022 Book Award from Noemi Press.
To reserve a copy of Girl Work (Noemi Press, March 15, 2024, paperback, $18), please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve Girl Work for March 23rd” in the subject line.
Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican-American poet and writer. He is the author of the debut novel, Where There Was Fire (Flatiron, 2023). He is a Canto Mundo fellow and alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. His prose and poetry have been published in PANK, The Rumpus, F(r)iction, Joyland Magazine, and Akashic Books. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.
Zefyr Lisowski is a poet and essayist from the Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina. A poetry co-editor of the Whiting Award winning Apogee Journal, she’s the author of two poetry collections, Blood Box (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and Girl Work, winner of the 2022 Noemi Book Prize. A 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Nonfiction and 2023 Queer|Art Fellow, Zefyr has received further support from Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Blue Mountain Center, the Center for the Humanities, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She’s seen grave robbers twice. Her essay collection about horror movies, exes, and love is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in Fall 2025.