Front cover of Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed by Amish Trivedi

Department of English doctoral students Amish Trivedi and BP Sutton celebrated their recently published books with a poetry reading February 15 at the Publications Unit in Williams Hall Annex. Trivedi’s new book, Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed, was published by Shearsman Books last month and is a Poetry Book Society recommendation in the United Kingdom for spring 2019. Sutton’s chapbook [something billited, something treatise] was published by Oxblood Press in 2018.

Poet Amish Trivedi stands in front of a mural.

Amish Trivedi, courtesy of Jenn Skrmetti-Trivedi.

Trivedi is also the author of the poetry collection Sound/Chest, which appeared in 2015 from Coven Press. His writing has also appeared in New American Writing, Kenyon Review Online, Typo, Hyperallergic, and Entropy, and he has also published the chapbooks What We Remembered Before the Fire, The Destructions, Everyone’s but Mine, Museum of Vandals, The Breakers, and The Selections from Episode III.

Of his newest book, Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed, reviewer rob mclennan writes that it is “a collection of poems that exist in a kind of dream-state, hovering directly between perception, anxiety and the world.” mclennan also notes that Trivedi’s time in Normal may have played a part in the “thread of Abraham Lincoln poems that run through the book.”

Trivedi graduated with a B.A. in history from the University of Georgia and an M.F.A. in literary arts from Brown University. He currently teaches English courses at Illinois State University while finishing his Ph.D. in English studies.

Sutton’s chapbook [something billeted, something treatise] was composed through an aleatoric process that uses lines from previously published works and subjects them to constraints and chance operations. Sutton’s poetry has also appeared in Verse Daily, Bayou Magazine, Quarterly West, burntdistrict, Sycamore Review, Barrow Street, Salt Hill, and Washington Square Review. He currently teaches English courses at Illinois State University as a graduate teaching assistant while completing his Ph.D.