Poetry Book Club: Excuse Me As I Kiss the Sky

featuring Excuse Me As I Kiss the Sky by Rudy Francisco, hosted by Lisa Roberts and Caleb Rainey.

Join us for Poetry Book Club from Iowa City Poetry! We'll gather together for a casual and lively conversation about this month's selected book of poetry.

This session's special guest host is spoken word poet, teacher, and winner of the Iowa Author Award Caleb Rainey!

DATE

Tuesday, October 22

TIME

6:30-7:30 CST

Location

There are two ways to join us! In person or online. To attend in person, head to @ PS1 Close House, 538 South Gilbert St., in Iowa City. To attend online, register to get the Zoom Link. 

READING

Feel free to bring along your own copy of the book. If you can't get one right now, we've provided a PDF with a short selection of poems from the collection. See that here. 

Rudy Francisco is one of the most recognizable names in Spoken Word Poetry. He has been the 2009 National Underground Poetry Slam Champion, the 2010 Individual World Poetry Slam Champion, and the 2017 National Poetry Slam Champion. He’s performed his poems on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and penned six collections of poetry, including Excuse Me As I Kiss the Sky (Button Poetry 2024), I’ll Fly Away (Button Poetry 2020), and Helium (Button Poetry 2017). The accolades are impressive, but his performances are another thing altogether. His viral poetry videos have won millions of views, and he tours the United States performing his work to sold out crowds. Blending social critique, introspection, honesty, and humor, Francisco’s performances light up the stage while illuminating the interconnectedness of us all.

EXCUSE ME AS I KISS THE SKY

In Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky, Rudy Francisco weaves together various poetic forms, hip-hop, and storytelling in a way that makes the quotidian seem spectacular. This is one of the things he is best at, making the arcane accessible in a way that allows us all, professional and pupil alike, the ability to kiss the sky.  – Javon Johnson, author of Ain’t Never Not Been Black

Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky is the third installment of the Rudy Francisco poetry collection. With every book, the author utilizes various tools and methods to excavate his experiences and find poetry in everyday things. Rudy believes that poetry can be found in our immediate surroundings at any given moment and poignantly includes this idea as the foundation of his work.

In this book, Rudy Francisco bravely explores poetic forms such as the contrapuntal, golden shovel and the ode, while offering explanations and his approach to using the aforementioned. Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky is meant to inspire its readers, expose them to different avenues of approaching the act of writing poetry and invites them to try it for themselves. Francisco takes the nuances of the craft that feel esoteric and breaks them down so the average person can engage and enjoy poetry in ways that feel familiar.

The author uses this book to further explore subjects such as love, heartbreak, identity and healing. Rudy takes feelings, turns them into vehicles that tell stories, exhibits how multifaceted the human experience is and how connected all of us actually are.

Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky is insightful, commanding but also comforting in a myriad of ways.