Book Launch: Will Pittman, LIMBO
Book Launch: Will Pittman, LIMBO
Join us via Zoom as Senior Lecturer Will Pittman discusses his book, Limbo, with Grace Cavalieri, the 2018–2023 Poet Laureate of Maryland and host of the radio program The Poet and the Poem. Cavalieri will conduct the interview in the first half-hour, which will be followed by sharing collage work by Bugs Pacino, guitar music, and a Q&A.
Limbo is the second of a trilogy called The Profane Comedy. Both Perdition and Limbo have been published by New Academia Publishing, and the third, Elysium, is due out next year. The poem is structured like Dante's Divine Comedy, but set in an American milieu, with the over-arching theme of irony-with-love.
D. Selby Fing is "lost in helicular wandering" when Abraham Lincoln, at the behest of Lilica Del Rio, arrives to convey him through his dark world, to show the purpose of life, the meaning of American history, the construction of identity, and the necessity of love. It's not an easy journey, and Fing is at best an ambivalent pilgrim. In Limbo, which takes place in New Bedford, Massachusetts from 1827–1899, Lincoln and Fing encounter Millard Fillmore, Stephen Douglas, Ulysses Grant, Andrew Jackson, among many others. Fing must witness Lincoln's assassination and carry on without him. But then Frederick Douglass and Gertrude Stein arrive to help him complete this phase of the adventure.