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Open Books: Readings
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May 2012
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4 COREY MARKS
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12 MELISSA DICKEY & ZACH SAVICH
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20 THOMAS BRUSH
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27 MEREDITH COLE
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June 2012
1 DANA LEVIN
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5 Open Elsewhere Series LUCIA PERILLO
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Saturday, May 12, 2012 at 07:30 PM
MELISSA DICKEY & ZACH SAVICH
Tonight we welcome two intriguing poets who are also graduates of the University of Washington and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, co-editors of Thermos literary magazine — and friends. This promises to be a warm, invigorating evening. Melissa Dickey, who lives and teaches in her hometown of New Orleans, is the author of The Lily Will ($14 Rescue Press), an attractive-in-all-ways volume. The spare, thrumming lyrics it contains seem a kind of contemporary pastoral, the rural and the urban each a place for their singular, quiet meditations to unfold. It is a book honed and lilting, nimbly revealing landscapes both vast and room-size, as well as the people who inhabit them (the poet included).
"Betrothal"
The only way to be engaged
is to be optimistic.
Oranges, someone let fall oranges,
ripe, it’s their season.
They lay bright in dust
and shell gravel, the center
of a still life dropped,
rolled off a truck.
Imagining you as I step,
you as seasonal fruit, cherries
rotting around trees.
Wild blackberries, a sheet of melon.
I align myself over and over accordingly.
Zach Savich, who teaches at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, is the author of a book of creative non-fiction, a chapbook, and three poetry collections, most recently The Firestorm ($15.95), which was the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book Competition. It is a volume at once dislocating and rich with specificity, its unusual details accumulating like wind-swept drifts of snow or ash. Desire and transformation stain the poems, making them at once intimate and distant. They are filled with a searching mind and a music both fragmented and graceful.
from "The Man who Lost his Head"
Fields in a cloud-caught light. Streets
salt white near sun-eroded brick.
The light’s hanging perforations like
phone slips on a pole’s poster
for something lost. There are no narratives,
economics, or theology, only the geologic
triad: heat, pressure, time.
Dear. Have seen the need to go
to extremes so they won’t come
for you. Snow no longer melting
but melted to its presences, re-adhering
outside the frozen swamp by billboards blank
or hand-painted or billboards dark.
Rising fog. Hand-painted ice.
Insist: there is nothing that is not green.
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Sunday, May 20, 2012 at 03:00 PM
THOMAS BRUSH
Tom Brush’s latest collection, Last Night ($15.95), which received the 2011 Blue Lynx Prize from Lynx House Press, is like a well-made drink, warming but not sugar-coated. His work shows a poet’s watchful eye, a high-school English teacher’s vigorous embrace of literature, and a bartender’s experienced welcome — all vocations that grace his resume. World-worn and tender, his lyrical poems are haunted by losses yet woven with grateful joy.
“What I Didn’t Write”
I didn’t write about those last moments, the long
Night rocking beneath the overpass, trucks
In flames heading for Butte, Idaho
Falls, the cigarettes he rolled burnt
To the cold beginning of what he had left. I didn’t write
About the body-filled ditches, the days stinging
with stones
Of ice, and snow silencing what he might have said,
When I thought sorrow was as good as prayer,
And wished the heaven we want so badly
To believe in didn’t have to be found
Only in death. I didn’t realize
It’s all a gift, the broken and the lost, the inevitable
End, and the glory of clouds draped over the
curved road
Home. I didn’t write a word, this life held out
To me in the beauty of the ordinary
And monstrous day.
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Sunday, May 27, 2012 at 03:00 PM
MEREDITH COLE
Meredith Cole's first collection, Miniatures, was the winner of the 2011 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Field, The Seattle Review, Poetry Northwest, and other publications. Raised in Redmond, Washington, she received an MFA in Poetry, as well as a Masters in Teaching, from the University of Washington. From 1999–2000, she taught English in Uwajima, Japan, and now teaches fourth grade at Salmon Bay School in the Seattle Public Schools.
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Friday, June 01, 2012 at 07:30 PM
DANA LEVIN
We're very pleased that we have been able to reschedule Dana Levin and look forward to having her at our podium to read from her latest collection, Sky Burial ($15 Copper Canyon Press). Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was awarded the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and was followed by the volume Wedding Day. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation and was a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow. She teaches in and is co-chair of the Creative Writing and Literature Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
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Tuesday, June 05, 2012 at 07:30 PM
Open Elsewhere Series LUCIA PERILLO
An Open Elsewhere event, this reading takes place in the Chapel Performance Space on the 4th floor of the Good Shepherd Center (two blocks north of Open Books) at 4649 Sunnyside. It gives us great pleasure to host the ever amazing writer Lucia Perillo as she reads from her new poetry collection, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths ($22 Copper Canyon Press). Ms. Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979 with a major in wildlife management and subsequently worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her MA in English at Syracuse University and has published five earlier books of poetry as well as a collection of essays and one of short stories. A resident of Olympia, Washington, she was a MacArthur Fellow in 2000 and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010.
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