To Umber & Morphology poetry reading and book(s) launch

with Uche Nduka and Erica Miriam Fabri

We are pleased to welcome Uche Nduka, as he returns to Brooklyn with a new collections of poems To Umber, and Erica Miriam Fabri for her new collection Morphology

“‘Uche Nduka has long established himself as a master of the short, gnomic, aphoristic poem. In To Umber, he has woven strings of three- and four-line bursts of verbal melody into long tapestries of urban music. An “archaeologist at the mall,” “wary of world-weariness,” Nduka braids florilegia of observation and longing, jazzy micro-solos of dismay, desire, and delight. These poems are snappy, sassy, veering from high theory to low innuendo; they are shot through with a constant dark undercurrent of the crisis of the body politic, of the world as a whole—but warm with “a wild sort of tenderness,” alive with joy at “the fullness / Of the music of fuchsia.”
—Mark Scroggins

For Uche Nduka “the act of writing is an invitation to inquiry, argument, communion. Poetry is woven into the very fabric of the sensuous, the emotional, the political. My work leans into wonder but goes beyond just beauty. I let the poem dance in the light and shadow of all kinds of truth and experience. For me, the keyword is justice. The poems in To Umber combat stoic indifference and silence. I believe that the work of a cosmic lover is never over. In me the poetry of revolt has found its writer.”

"Where love meets language—a stunning exploration of bodies, both present and vanished"

Morphology, by definition, is the study of the forms of words and bodies. In her second book, Erica Miriam Fabri uses the formation of words—molded into poems—to celebrate and mourn various forms of bodies. The bodies featured as main characters in this collection include lovers, family members, children, ghosts, rats, jellyfish, skeletons, and snakes. While this book of poetry is set mostly in New York City, it also journeys to far-flung destinations such as outer space, the deep sea, and the afterlife.

Uche Nduka Uche Nduka is a poet-pilgrim, collagist, and essayist presently living in New York City. He is the author of 14 volumes of poems of which the latest are Scissorwork (Roof Books, 2022) and Bainbridge Island Notebook (Roof Books, 2023). A NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry, his writing has been translated into Italian, Finnish, Turkish, Arabic, Dutch, German, Serbo-Croat, Romanian. His essays on music, poetry, mortality, politics, and travel have appeared in various online and print outlets. He teaches at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and Queens College-CUNY.

Erica Miriam Fabri is a poet and the author of two books: Morphology (Write Bloody Publishing, 2025) and Dialect of a Skirt (Hanging Loose Press, 2010). She has been widely published and worked on projects as a writer or editor for The New York Knicks, Urban Word NYC, HBO, and Nickelodeon Television. She teaches at Pace University and The College of Staten Island. She is also a Freelance Photographer, a New Yorker, and a Mama.