Tuesday Nov. 29

6pm

Labyrinth Bookstore

First coined in 1628, the term ‘blackacre’ is a legal fiction, a hypothetical estate. It is also a password among lawyers marking one’s initiation into a centuries-old tradition of legal indoctrination. Monica Youn’s fascinating, multifaceted new collection, “Blackacre,” uses the term to suggest landscape, legacy, what is allotted to each of us—a tract of land, a work of art, a heritage, a body, a destiny. We invite you to a reading.

What are the limits of the imagination’s ability to transform what is given? On any particular acre, can we plant a garden? Found a city? Unearth a treasure? Build a home? Youn, a former lawyer and Lecturer in Creative Writing and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton, brings her lawyerly intelligence and lyric gifts to bear on questions of fertility and barrenness as she attempts to understand her own desire—her own struggle—to conceive a child. Where the shape-making mind encounters unalterable fact, “Blackacre” explores new territories of art, meaning, and feeling.

http://arts.princeton.edu/people/profiles/myyoun/