Save the date: January 23, 2027 is the double book launch of Repair Attempts 🧶 and The Night Season 🌕!
Grab a drink, pick up your copy of the books, get them signed, and hear Julie and Cameron read from their new collections. Free and open to all!
The Night Season: Rooted in the tension between science and wonder, The Night Season probes phenomena we are aware of but will never fully grasp: the workings of the cosmos that we see only eons after their actual occurrence, deep time rendered through artifacts left by people before us, shifts and accretions that occur beneath the earth’s surface that we sometimes feel but never truly witness. A crown of sonnets and several ghazals nestle among epistolary forms and free verse in this collection that gracefully intertwines research and prosody to explore the universe the way only a poet can.
Julie Swarstad Johnson is the author of the poetry collection Pennsylvania Furnace and two poetry chapbooks, Orchard Light and Jumping the Pit, as well as a coeditor of the anthology Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight. She lives in Tucson, where she works as an archivist and librarian for the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Repair Attempts: The titular “repair attempts” describes the words and actions people use to heal broken connections and de-escalate conflict. In his debut collection, Cameron Quan transforms this concept into a powerful lens for examining moral responsibility in contemporary America. Quan’s Repair Attempts navigates Asian American identity, American exceptionalism, patriarchal violence, grief, and the nature of apologies. The speakers grapple with transgression and healing from unexpected angles, asking what kind of repair is possible in a world marred by atrocities. These poems dance across landscapes—from an imagined American holiday of atonement to the pope’s apology to Indigenous peoples, from a mother preparing to flee domestic violence to an unsettling childhood game boys play with butterflies. A chorus of repair attempts that toggle between the personal and political, this collection invites us into difficult territory where failure, wrongdoing, and shame require a collective reckoning and a collective effort to be better.
Cameron Quan is a multidisciplinary writer from Tucson, AZ. He is the author of Repair Attempts (forthcoming from Northwestern University Press, 2027) and the chapbook Apology Engine (Gold Line Press, 2022), winner of the Gold Line Press 2020 Chapbook Contest. He works at the University of Arizona Press and serves on the poetry committee of the Tucson Festival of Books.
