Join us for an exciting PEM Reads event with author Joan Wickersham, in conversation about her new book of poetry No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck.

This event will include a 90-minute discussion with the author, followed by a book signing. Copies are available at the PEM Shop.

About the Book

“No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a poetic and philosophical meditation ignited by a beautiful, frightening, mysterious object: the 17th-century Swedish warship Vasa, which sank only minutes into its maiden voyage and lay forgotten underwater until it was found and raised more than three hundred years later.

Beginning with Joan Wickersham’s first sight of the ship in its Stockholm museum, her pieces – intimate, irreverent, urgent – weave together the Vasa’s story and the associations it evokes. She addresses the shipbuilders, the divers and restorers, the men and women who drowned in the wreck, and the objects they left behind: shoes and cooking pots, game boards and bones. She interrogates…the ship itself — an emblem of death and rebirth, a monumental failure whose flaws made it an enduring success, a vessel both destroyed and preserved by catastrophe.”

PEM Reads celebrates the art of literature and the creative act of writing through a year-round series of collaborative book club readings and author events, both in person and online. By gathering to read and discuss world-class literature and meet authors, PEM Reads seeks to deepen our sense of community and celebrate great storytelling. We hope you’ll join us!

About the Author

Joan Wickersham is the author of The News from Spain and The Suicide Index, a National Book Award Finalist. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines including Agni, Poetry, New England Review, Ploughshares and Story, and her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is also an op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe. She has published essays and reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the International Herald Tribune, and has read her work on National Public Radio’s “On Point” and “Morning Edition.” Wickersham has taught at Harvard, Emerson, UMASS Boston and the Bennington Writing Seminars. She graduated from Yale with a degree in art history and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.