Poetry Reading with Isabelle Correa

Join us in celebrating Isabelle Correa's new collection, Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away In Fear of Losing It. Join us in welcoming poet Isabelle Correa to RHB as we celebrate the release of her new book, Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away In Fear of Losing It, published by Arcana Press. Author reading followed by discussion and audience Q&A. Books for purchase and author signing. About the Book PORTRAIT OF A PERSON WHO PUSHES LOVE AWAY IN FEAR OF LOSING IT is a lyric, brutally honest, darkly funny portrait of a woman raised on violence, God, and American television, who spends her adult life trying to understand why she keeps mistaking hurt for love and keeps coming back anyway. Throughout, Correa braids intergenerational trauma, religious myth, and pop culture-Fleabag, Barbie, Sylvia Plath, country fairs, typhoon warnings, the Oscars-into an intimate, cinematic interior life. The voice is confessional and self-aware, willing to be ridiculous, horny, grandiose, and devastated in the same stanza. The speaker is bisexual, chronically hopeful, and permanently suspicious of hope; she wants to be a wife, a saint, a poet, a problem, and ultimately a person who can love without disappearing. Theollection closes not with a neat redemption arc, but with a hard-won willingness to stay-inside her own body, her grief, her desire, and her life-to see what love might be if it isn't a wound. Isabelle Correa is a poet from Washington state living in Mexico City. She studied creative writing at Western Washington University, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and is the author of the chapbook Sex is From Mars But I Love You From Venus. She is a winner of the 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize with Write Bloody Publishing for her debut full-length collection, Good Girl and Other Yearnings. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Pank, The Rebis, and more.