Relative Distance: a Poetry Reading with Kiyoko Reidy and Lily Someson
Join the Wisconsin Book Festival for an afternoon with local poets Lily Someson and Kiyoko Reidy.
Reidy’s Black Holes and Their Feeding Habits illuminates worlds that are exquisite, shimmering, made tender by awe and grief. The poems breathe portals into familial care, inherited violence, intergenerational loss, annd the natural landscapes within and around us. We encounter “monarch wings resplendent ans church windows”, an obaasan laying flowers at a cemetery; oranges like “fist sized fires alight / in the branches”, a bodily desire to “borderless in the wild dark.” In the wisdom of these poems, there lives a keen recognition of the self shape-shifting toward the light. Reidy’s lush attention to care teach us to open ourselves to the world “wildly, marveling at all this abundance.”
In Mistaken for Loud Comets, Someson intertwines experiences around incarceration, queerness, and the Black body in America. Someson’s poetic genius can be felt in her fortitude—she embraces the storm with startling empathy, and within these poems, offers up her most vulnerable moments alongside her most resolute proclamations of selfhood, claiming space on the page as if fighting for her birthright. Exploring the outermost limits of identity with a gentle, inquiring mind, Someson lets the poems in mistaken for loud comets be “everything/ all at once.”
Kiyoko Reidy
Kiyoko Reidy (she/they) is a writer from East Tennessee. Her debut poetry collection, Black Holes and Their Feeding Habits, was published with Terrapin Books in Spring 2025. Her writing has been featured in RHINO, Four Way Review, Creative Nonfiction, swamp pink (FKA Crazyhorse), and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, WI.
Lily Someson
Lily Someson (she/they) is a poet from Gary, Indiana. She is the author of Mistaken for Loud Comets, winner of the Host Publications Spring 2021 Chapbook prize, and has been published in the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Daily, Underblong, and Court Green among others. She graduated with her MFA in Poetry from Vanderbilt University and is now the co-owner of Baldwin’s Books & Records, a radical bookstore pop-up in Madison, WI.