Opium and Ambergris by Colin Dekeersgieter
In conversation with Tyree Daye and Carlina Duan
Join us for stimulating and important conversation with so much local talent!!!
About the book
Winner of the 2023 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize
Opium and Ambergris is the haunting debut collection by poet Colin Dekeersgieter, whose lyric poems scrutinize a family’s history with addiction, death, and mental illness.
Reeling from the loss of his brother to a heroin overdose, Dekeersgieter grieves while doing his best to keep his suicidal mother alive and raise his family. As a result, these poems shift between historical retellings and urgent examinations of love. In the title poem, “opium” is associated with death and “ambergris”—a substance formed in sperm whales’ digestive tracts and valued by many cultures for over one thousand years—is associated with love. As family history, death, trauma, and duty become entwined with the acts of living, suffering, growing, and writing, these metaphorical categories become essentially interchangeable. Opium comes from the beautiful poppy; ambergris is an ingredient still used in high-end perfumes to help the fragrance last longer, yet it is extracted from dead whales. Thus, “opium” and “ambergris” come to represent the possible coexistence of love and loss.
With many poems written in emergency departments, behavioral wards, and intensive care units, Dekeersgieter does not just honestly chronicle a family crisis but seeks to survive through poetry.
Our Guests
Colin Dekeersgieter is a poet, editor, and teacher. His debut collection Opium and Ambergris (Kent State University Press) was selected by Marilyn Chin for the 2023 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Brink, The Greensboro Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MA from the CUNY, Graduate Center, an MFA from New York University, and is a PhD candidate at UNC, Chapel Hill.
Tyree Daye was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and River Hymns (American Poetry Review, 2017), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Cave Canem fellow and a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Daye is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Kate Tufts Award finalist, and a 2021 Paterson Prize finalist. He was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received an Amy Clampitt Residency. Daye is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In January 2023, Daye served as Guest Editor of the Poem-a-Day series.
Carlina Duan is a poet, educator, and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collections I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017), and Alien Miss (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2021). Her recent poems appear in POETRY , Narrative Magazine , The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Carlina is an Assistant Professor in English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill.