Book Launch: Julie Gard’s “I Think I Know You”

Zenith Bookstore hosts a book launch for Duluth poet Julie Gard’s new collection I Think I Know You. Gard will read and discuss her new book, and answer questions. Refreshments will be served.

In I Think I Know You, Gard explores “the ways we struggle to understand each other’s hearts and histories, along with our own.” The prose poems speak of “deep connection and tragicomic gaps in understanding, as life’s pedantic, transcendent rhythms are mined for revealing moments and messages.” Elements include dialogue overheard in northern Minnesota coffee shops and at the Jersey shore, personal crashes and landings in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, and queer identity in middle age. The final section of the book is a series of text messages sent by the poet to herself during a crucial election season, examining daily life, dreamscape, and the collective psyche in a time of political upheaval. Gard attempts to map out, complicate, and bridge divides, concluding that a sense of belonging, and a shared sense of home, may be the most important thing we have to offer each other.

Copies of the book are available for purchase and signing.

Julie Gard teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin Superior. She has a B.A. in English from Grinnell College, an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Minnesota, and a certificate proving she survived a challenging and rewarding year in Vladivostok, Russia as a Fulbright Graduate Fellow.

Julie’s first prose poetry collection, Home Studies, won the Many Voices Project Prize from New Rivers Press and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. Additional collections include Scrap: On Louise Nevelson. Chapbooks include Obscura: The Daguerreotype Series and Russia in 17 Objects. Julie lives a block from Lake Superior in Duluth with her partner, the poet Michelle Matthees, their Norwegian Forest cat, and their ever-alert hound-mix pup.