Poetry, book arts, and painting highlight our weekly arts picks

As we do each week, we're getting picks for arts & culture events to check out in the Puget Sound region. KUOW’s Kim Malcolm got these recommendations from writer Shin Yu Pai, who just this week was named Seattle's Civic Poet. She also hosts the KUOW podcast "The Blue Suit."

Poet and former cage fighter Jenny Liou, at Elliott Bay Books

Liou is going to be reading from her new collection of poetry, “Muscle Memory.” And she is going to be in conversation with the artist and writer Tessa Hulls. Liou writes quite a bit in this collection of poems about her experiences competing, training, and fighting in the disciplines of mixed martial arts. She also ties this in some ways to her experiences of being a diasporic Chinese person. She talks about some of that heritage of intergenerational violence that occurred with various displacements and is able to craft together this really powerful collection of poems that looks at the relationship between immigration, migration and violence.

Shapes of Things to Come, at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art

This book arts exhibition features 40 artists from local, national and international backgrounds. Book arts is the idea of sculptural, object-like books, often created by hand with a lot of attention to structure, artistry, printing techniques and really innovative bindings. It is in and of itself an art form that brings together so many different arts — writing, binding, paper making — in this kind of beautiful form that brings together all these different expressions of creativity.

Elemental Gestures: Caryn Friedlander & Alan Lau, at ArtXchange Gallery

Alan Chong Lau is a former winner of the Mayor's Arts Award, and he's been the arts editor for The International Examiner newspaper for decades. I know him primarily as an amazing and brilliant poet, but he is also a painter working both in ink and watercolor. He's always putting out new work and having exhibitions and it's exciting to see that he's going to be having a show.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.