GRIEF & SURREALISM ✦ Karan Kapoor

Grief doesn't follow linear narratives, and neither should your poems about it. In this workshop, we'll explore how surrealism—with its dreamlike logic, strange juxtapositions, and emotional honesty—can help us write into loss without sentimentality or cliché.

We'll look at contemporary poets who merge the personal with the strange, then move into generative exercises that embrace illogic, image-driven thinking, and metaphor that doesn't explain itself. You'll leave with new drafts and a clearer sense of how surrealism can give grief the language it actually needs.

• Notebook and pen (or laptop—whatever helps you draft quickly)
• 2-3 poems about grief or loss that you're willing to workshop or reference (published or unpublished)
• If you have experience with submitting, then a list of 5-10 dream literary magazines

Karan Kapoor is the Editor-in-chief of ONLY POEMS, and the Fiction Editor of Strange Pilgrims. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, AGNI, Shenandoah, North American Review, and elsewhere, fiction in JOYLAND and the other side of hope, and translations in The Offing and The Los Angeles Review. He also serves on the editorial board of Alice James Books.