Metatron Press is overjoyed to announce that our sole book release of 2024, Opening Ceremony by Laura Marie Marciano, is now available for pre-order. The book will be released on September 22, 2024.
PRE-ORDER NOW
Opening Ceremony is the second collection of poetry from Marciano and follows the speaker of her first book, Mall Brat, from the 2008 recession to the current hellscape of downward mobility for many aging millennials. Finding absurdity in the Fourth of July, backyard pools, surveillance mirrors, and Sol De Janeiro, the poems navigate the pain and promise of letting go of expectations as one seeks motherhood. Wet landscapes, missed fertile windows, Botox routines, quiet quitting rituals, political centrists, and text message banter are navigated by the author’s perfect balance of tenderness, pastiche, camp, and wit. Ultimately, the poems in this book reveal the glimmer that still exists in leaning from a collective state of drowning, into the birth of a child, breaking open our hearts to a soft landing and a queer future.
Laura Marie Marciano is an author, educator, and media artist. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College in Performance and Interactive Media Arts, and her PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Rhode Island. Laura’s first book of poetry, Mall Brat, was released in 2016, from Civil Coping Mechanism Press. Excerpts from this book appear in the Poetry Foundation’s archive.
Marciano is a multimodal artist, whose writing and performance have been featured with NPR and Poetry’s podcast Poetry Now! She has curated works of poetry and performance at MoMA PS1, Brooklyn Museum, and RISD Museum, and has given readings at many venues across the nation, including Brown University. Laura is also a production artist who has worked on films that have been celebrated by the TriBeca Film Festival, and Sundance Film Festival. In 2014, Laura started gemstone readings, a poetry and video art collective. Her most recent production under this label is an experimental meditation on trans parenthood, which will premiere in January at Out-FRONT Fest in NYC.
Laura has served as an assistant editor for Barrow Street Press, and the Ocean State Review, while receiving her PhD under Dr. Peter Covino. She has studied with poets CA Conrad and Fred Moten, and is an active member of the poetry community. She served as a visiting assistant professor in writing at Lehigh University, and is currently a full-time lecturer in writing at SUNY’s premiere campus, Stony Brook University.
She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Carmelo.
