Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin

The poet will be joined in conversation by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin is a swirl of energy, emotion and observation that takes the reader across the world as well as deep into the complexities of modern queer life. Unabashedly sexual, and embracing a wide range of styles and tones, Byrne’s poems move easily from lines of love and desire to sharp critiques of capitalism and war, and the co-opting of queer culture by them both. These are destabilizing poems, poems filled with glittering imagery and ideas and questions and truths, poems that share the poet’s longing to live in a time that is not “as cruel and unjust / As every other time has been before it.”

“These are poems about survival. How we survive the unending violences that besiege us. How we survive the lies we tell ourselves when we don’t know how to forget.” – Daniel Borzutzky, author of Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018

Jake Byrne is the author of Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (Wolsack & Wynn, 2023) and DADDY (Brick Books, 2024), and has published poems in journals and anthologies throughout North America. Jake lives in Toronto.

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and scholar living in Chicago. He is most recently the author of Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019) and Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and the TS Eliot Foundation’s Four Quartets Prize. He is also co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989. He is currently  Humanities Teaching Fellow in English at the University of Chicago, where he works in the study of sexuality.

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This is an online event streamed via Zoom.

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