Shrines Book Launch & Poetry Party (Berkeley)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

It’s finally here!!! 

We couldn’t be happier to invite you to SHRINES Book Launch & Poetry Party on Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 6:30 PM in Berkeley, CA.

We will celebrate the birth of SHRINES with an evening of queer and trans South Asian drag, poetry, and revelry, hosted by Arati Warrier and featuring artists GQMujra and Zara Jamshed before a reading and book signing by author Sagaree Jain. The event will be held at Gilman Brewing in North Berkeley, with thanks for all they do for the queer culture.

This Pride Month, spend your Thursday night being moved to laughter and tears by these incredible artists and poets, not to mention grabbing your copy of SHRINES!

DOORS OPEN @6:30pm

SHOW STARTS @7pm

BOOK SIGNING @8pm

Fiery, devotional, and sparking with wit, these poems journey through love in all its forms. These are shrines to a mother’s tenderness, to a lover’s leaving words, to every colorful queer who has found themselves in the glowing image of another. SHRINES is half queer coming of age tale, half a mad dash to ecstasy, all pulsing with effervescent joy.

Praise for SHRINES

“We are so lucky to live in a world where this book exists. To go back to your own profane self and call it sacred, to make a ritual of it even, is a gift. Thank God for the images, lyricism, and wit offered in this book that teach the reader to make a shrine of themselves.”

– Arati Warrier, author of Longing and Other Heirlooms

“Sagaree Jain’s SHRINES is a revelatory body of poetry (body in every sense of the word – erotic, joyful, haunted, grieving, yearning) that explores and transforms our idea of what language can do. Jain writes with defiant tenderness and playfulness, always reaching for the love that lines our losses. Each line is at once precise and liberated, unspooling desire and celebration across the page.”

– K–Ming Chang, author of BESTIARY

“The poems in Sagaree Jain’s stunning debut work at the limits of the human body, desire, and memory. In SHRINES, language itself becomes a vehicle for unpacking the experience of living inside a body in an impossible world and finding pleasure there. This is a book that, as its title suggests, offers a reader multiple places to pray.”

– Sam Sax, author of Madness

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.