Sunday, September 28th, we welcome Camille Ralphs from the United Kingdom to Philadelphia on the occasion of the US publication of her debut collection, After You Were, I Am. She and Ernest Hilbert will read from their latest books, followed by an open mic session. Aaren Perry will emcee. Come on out!

Sunday, September 28th, 5PM

Upstairs at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102, 215-928-8118

FREE!

Camille Ralphs‘s debut collection of poems, After You Were, I Am (UK: Faber, 2024) was a Book of the Year for 2024 in The Guardian and The Telegraph, and is published in the US this autumn (McSweeney’s). She is an editor at the Times Literary Supplement and teaches at the University of Oxford.

*

Ernest Hilbert is the author of the poetry collections Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—Last One Out, and Storm Swimmer, selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize. He lives in Philadelphia, where he works as a rare book dealer. Visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com.

*

Praise for Camille Ralphs’ After You Were, I Am:

“After You Were, I Am was at least a decade in the making, and the strength of the poetry is a measure of the crisis it confronts. […] First the stylish translations and imitations of canonical prayers, with their inflections of humour and modern living; next the closet drama of the Pendle Witch Trials, with Ralphs’s empathetic ventriloquism of these isolated, beleaguered souls in agony; and finally the fully imagined monologues of [John] Dee, a figure who is neither victim nor moral exemplar. […] Ralphs’s talent for subsuming her ego in her subjects […] gives her a gravitas few think to look for anymore.”
—Ange Mlinko, London Review of Books

“Ralphs’s mischievous, metaphysical debut riffs on great religious poets, revisits the victims of the Pendle Witch Trials and explores the life of Elizabethan conjuror John Dee.”
—Tristram Fane Saunders, “Top 50 Books of 2024,” The Telegraph

“Camille Ralphs’s After You Were, I Am brings a medieval spirituality vibrantly into the modern world.”
—Rishi Dastidar, “The Best Poetry Books of 2024,” The Guardian

“It’s a rare debut collection today that dares to be difficult, to be theologically complex, to be theological at all. Yet After You Were, I Am showcases an ambition, seriousness and wit that make it strangely timeless. […] beautiful […] irreverent […] terrifying […] impeccably researched […] jaw-dropping. It’s impossible to do it justice in less than a dissertation, but […] I expect to be re-reading it for years to come.”
—Luke Kennard, The Telegraph

“A contemporary approach to metaphysical poetry that is serious without being lofty. […] It is rare to come across a book of poems in which a forensic approach to phrasemaking sits on the same seesaw as an ambitious exploration of history and religious belief.”
—Matthew Welton, Times Literary Supplement

“From the outset of After You Were, I Am, the reader embarks on an astonishing adventure […] There is an eerie, quivering, steampunk depth to Ralphs’ poetry. The writing grounds itself in a type of earthy empathy for ‘the workers of this world,’ as well as historical figures, but effortlessly straddles the spiritual and fantastic, too.”
—Jennifer Lee-Tsai, The Guardian

“That Ralphs forms and reforms such disparate voices […] is an indication of her dexterity of voice, scholarship and capacity for holding attention. […] Novel, in many senses of the word: the characters and their worlds, violences, desires and delusions draw one in; novel too, in the best tradition of newness—connected viscerally, sometimes viciously, to what’s gone before.”
—Padraig O’Tuauma, The Poetry Review

“Ralphs’ first full-length collection is dense and strange, but definitely superb […] Ralphs has a whole crackling lightning nervous system charging throughout, which brings the gods (often God) down from somewhere above with electric clarity—and clarity is what Ralphs’ tricky, tricksy poems are never without.”
—Austin Spendlowe, Oxford Review of Books

“The collection is, in a sense […] a miniature library, brought alive by Ralphs’ electric ability to inhabit its periods and personalities. This is a collection that steps bravely into the Holy row that has been blazing for centuries—and makes thrilling poetry out of the racket.”
—Andrew McCulloch, The Manchester Review

“Both touching and wittily current […] the language as delicious as the narrative is compelling.”
—Martina Evans, Irish Times

“Camille Ralphs’ disconcertingly accomplished debut […] finds words of fire for our exhausted secular age. […] I could write a thousand words about Ralphs’ collection and barely have begun.”
—Rachael Mann, The Tablet

“Disapproving despair is offset by lines of radical beauty […] Blakean in their fidelity to British numinous experience […] setting the scene for the unnervingly brilliant presence of the hapless Dee in the final sequence. […] Its electrifying legacy will not, one hopes, pay the price of calling up and sounding out the magus.”
—Kirsten Norrie, PN Review

“It’s exquisitely wrought and breathtakingly beautiful but, like George Herbert’s The Temple, there are no cheap sideshow stunts here. Form and function reanimate the dead and in their fragility and mortality we see ourselves.”
—John Field, Poor Rude Lines

“This book has earned its plaudits: Ralphs is a highly original poet, a technically brilliant prosodist given to flights of dextrous wordplay, with a disorientating gonzo theological focus that renders her nothing short of a ‘modern metaphysical.’”
—Kevin Power, Wild Court

“Ambitious and effervescent […] I think my favourite book of the year.”
—John Clegg, London Review Bookshop’s Books of the Year