Kate Daniels in conversation with Daniel Becker at New Dominion Bookshop

New Dominion Bookshop will host a book reading with author, poet and UVA alum Kate Daniels on Friday, Jan. 28, from 7-8 p.m.

Daniels will be reading from her debut memoir, Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis, which will be released from West Virginia University Press in early January.

A conversation with poet and doctor Daniel Becker will follow. This in-person event is free to attend and open to the public. The bookshop recommends arriving early for the best seating.

Slow Fuse of the Possible is a poet’s narrative of a troubled psychoanalysis, a lyric memoir, and a meditation on the powers of language, for good and ill. Throughout, the story is filtered through the mind of Emily Dickinson, whose poetry Daniels uses as a fulcrum for the interpretation of her own experience.

The book is saturated with Dickinson’s verse, and Dickinson is an increasingly haunting presence as crises emerge and the author unravels. Psychoanalyst Michael Eigen has described Slow Fuse as a “searching, scorching account of psyche, psychoanalysis, and life [which allows readers to] appreciate the gift of poetic creation in the midst of destructive moments.”

Daniels is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently In the Months of My Son’s Recovery. A Guggenheim Fellow, professor emerita of English, and former director of creative writing at Vanderbilt University, she has deep ties to Charlottesville and UVA, having been an undergraduate, graduate student, and faculty member at UVA in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2019, she was a visiting scholar at the Center for Health Humanities and Ethics, pursuing research interests in the convergences of poetry and psychoanalysis, and the therapeutic uses of narrative writing in medical training and treatment.

Becker practiced and taught internal medicine at UVA School of Medicine until he retired in 2018. He now practices and teaches internal medicine part time. His first book of poems, 2nd Chance, was chosen by Jericho Brown for the first book prize at New Issues Press. He published a chapbook of poems, Chance, in 2005.

“Last Chance” is not a good name for the next book.

For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.