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Open Books: Readings
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May 2013
1 ANDREW ZAWACKI
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3 RAE ARMANTROUT
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5
6
7
8
9
10 MARJORIE MANWARING & W. VANDOREN WHEELER
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12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24 ROBERT WRIGLEY
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26 LAURA READ & MAYA JEWELL ZELLER
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28
29
30
31
June 2013
1 JAMES ARTHUR, NATALIE DIAZ, & TOMAS Q. MORIN
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3
4
5
6
7 MARY SZYBIST
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9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21 MICHAEL COLLIER
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23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
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Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 03:00 PM
KELLY DAVIO & JEANNINE HALL GAILEY
This afternoon we're joined by two Northwest writers whose new books offer poems of intensity and imagination. Kelly Davio's first full-length collection, Burn This House, published by Red Hen Press, rises out of her radical religious childhood and eventual break with the church. David Wagoner has praised her work, declaring, “Here is a clear, fresh voice enhanced by first-rate craftsmanship. Kelly Davio gives us poems full of original surprises.”
She is Managing Editor of The Los Angeles Review, Associate Editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal, a reviewer for Women’s Review of Books, and teaches English as a second language in Seattle.
“Burn This House”
Tell the rescuers they are not wanted.
Raise a hand to stop the water-bearers.
Let thin curtains snap glass panes
in sudden lashes of bright, and weave
smoke trails through space between your eyes.
Pull exhaled air back through the lips.
Hold each ember by your teeth in shelter.
Allow each column of timber to stray
from notions of form and size, catching
flakes of fire on your tongue. Move now:
circling, strange. Pound feet askew
in the wreck that roasts below.
Wave thin arms about your head—
bend wrists, push hands to lift
the flames to ripeness. Trace with bones
your semblance in the ash, and let darkness
surround, sloughing off the body’s burden.
Jeannine Hall Gailey's latest volume, Unexplained Fevers, enters the house of fairy tale and opens all its windows. As Beth Anne Fennelly has said of the book, "At the center of these poems—urgent, mysterious, evocative—we find the great topic of all fairy tales, transformation. Read [them] and be transformed." Ms. Gailey is the Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington, and the author of two earlier books of poetry, She Returns to the Floating World and Becoming the Villainess. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review, writes book reviews, and teaches at National University's MFA Program.
"Rapunzel Considers the Desert"
Like learning a foreign language,
I want to learn
a new sand—hardscrabble and brown.
I want a new heat in my blood.
blinded and shorn,
I desire new fruit
grown under an unforgiving sun.
Prickly pear,
open yourself to me. Agave nectar.
Quail, jackrabbit,
grackle and green hummingbird,
let your shadows fall.
Let a fierce light try to turn me to dust.
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Wednesday, May 01, 2013 at 07:30 PM
ANDREW ZAWACKI
Poet, translator, editor, and professor Andrew Zawacki joins us to read from his new book, Videotape ($14), published by Counterpath Press. The author of three earlier collections, he also has translated work from the Slovenian and the French, co-edits VERSE literary journal, and teaches at the University of Georgia. His latest volume is a deeply textured fusion of sound and imagery, an evocative rendering of landscapes near and far and from which we draw this sample—
from "Track A: Glassscape"
Within the horizon of gabardine
hills, raku-
fired as if forged in the kiln
of no-count Georgia mid-
July, the trees halloo Tallulah
Gorge, velarium & an event in
themselves, gouged by blunt per
-sephones of crimson & of green
—gren
-ache, wasabi, hen
-na, Fanta, ferric, gren
-adine—
& a few miles south
off 328, in Tugaloo State Park,
a beach that shouldn't
be there is, the lake now
8' low, & fishing lures
& sinkers & bobbers are
snagged on roots of the
oak've eroded, & mica
speckling reddish clay where
one can walk beneath an
orphaned dock
are a trillion mini
miroirs among the mullions
composing, composting the bank,
to show the singular, macular
sun what it looks like—severally
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Friday, May 03, 2013 at 07:30 PM
RAE ARMANTROUT
It is with pleasure we welcome back Rae Armantrout, whose crisp, thought-provoking, and at times whimsical work has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. This evening she reads from her latest collection, Just Saying ($22.95), published by Wesleyan University Press. She is a professor of writing in the Literature Department at the University of California in San Diego.
"The Look"
The boxer crab
attaches a sea anemone
to each claw,
waves.
*
You, small flower-bearing stick,
what is your true name?
*
Spooked and spooked again.
It's cute
when the intricately patterned
black and yellow fish
twitches
and shoots off
in a new direction.
*
From birth,
you've been moving
your eyes
back and forth,
looking
to be hailed.
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Friday, May 10, 2013 at 07:30 PM
MARJORIE MANWARING &
W. VANDOREN WHEELER
This evening we're visited by two writers whose work, both touching and wry, seeks out the unexpected, unsettling, and transformative hidden within the usual. Marjorie Manwaring reads from her first full-length book, Search for a Velvet-Lined Cape ($14.95 Mayapple Press). A resident of Seattle, she is a freelance writer and editor and serves as co-editor of the on-line poetry and art journal DMQ Review and as an editorial board member of Floating Bridge Press. Her new collection begins—
"Leaving some shell of yourself"
covered in sheets, you catch
your bus, pull the cord ten blocks
early, walk into the store that sells magic.
When your boss asks where you've been
you say you wanted to learn
how a thing disappeared comes back
how a velvet-lined cape
feels against skin.
W. Vandoren Wheeler's first book, The Accidentalist ($16), received the 2012 Dorothy Brunsman Prize and was published by Bear Star Press. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches writing and literature. His volume opens—
"Cause and Effect"
The lights rise just before the film finishes.
The pinball machine blacks out before
swallowing the last ball.
I load the shotgun to end our rabid dog,
but he's already splayed in the yard.
As I reach for the bus cord, the sign illuminates
with a bing.
I call to leave a message and she answers.
At the airport I shake hands with my father and see
his shoulders awkward with the hug he'd have
given me.
I twist the bulb to change it, it lights up my hand.
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Friday, May 24, 2013 at 07:30 PM
ROBERT WRIGLEY
In his ninth collection, Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems ($20 Penguin), Robert Wrigley offers poems both warm and aching in language that is fluidly musical and lucidly evocative. We are pleased that he is returning to our podium to read from it this evening. A recipient of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and the Poets' Prize, he teaches at the University of Idaho and lives on Moscow Mountain.
“Bovinity”
The steer has found, among the mud
and diminishing islands of snow,
a cropped-off but less coagulate expanse
where it can lie and sleep awhile.
From where I watch, I can see
the quiver of an ear, a hind hoof
gently twitching, the ordinary mammalian
evidence that it is dreaming. But of what?
I wonder. Fields of tall grass forever?
A hay crib Jesus dispensing infinite fodder?
Or maybe not of food at all but the litheness
of its cousins, the deer and the elk,
those dreams that materialize each night,
when it must merely doze in the darkness,
vigilant, awaiting, once again, the light,
so that it might, as it does now, dream.
Though it may be in this way I diminish it.
It may be the cowbird, just a moment ago
having alighted on its broad neck, is Nyx,
consort of Erebus; that it dreams the day
is the night. Or perhaps the cowbird is no bird
at all, but the dream, and the dream is flying.
And what of me then? Even in its sleep
it may be aware of the presence of the maker
of fences, bringer of the gun, conjurer
of the high-backed truck and the hunchbacked
butcher, builder of the gut pile the ravens
and magpies will celebrate, for as long
as the furtive night dogs will allow, though now,
in sun and full sleep, it fears not, as it lifts
and pumps its enormous wings and soars
over the vast brown and white body of the earth.
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Sunday, May 26, 2013 at 03:00 PM
LAURA READ & MAYA JEWELL ZELLER
Two poets from east of the Cascades share their work with us this afternoon. Laura Read's recent collection, Instructions for My Mother's Funeral ($15.95), received the Donald Hall Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. An English teacher at Spokane Falls Community College, her chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, won the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award in 2010. Her new book is a quietly potent gathering of poems from, as Dorianne Laux has said, "a mature lyrical voice translating memory's turbulent, wordless world."
"This Time We'll Go to Kentucky Fried Chicken"
You were the one with the body
that could balance on a skateboard,
dive into a pool, the water
closing behind you.
And you could hold your breath
at the bottom, watch the sunlight shatter
on the tile.
Your eye marked where to send a ball
and it would hit
the backboard, the mitt—
you could chart a trajectory
from the boy in the doorframe
who stood next to me and looked at our mother
not getting out of bed
after our father died,
his bed made, all the stripes pulled up vertical
under the pillow
where his head would never leave
another dent.
You said, If she dies too,
we’ll go to Kentucky Fried Chicken
not Wendy’s
where we went after the funeral
that you spent driving your matchbox cars
up and down the lines of wood
in the pews, steering the small wheels
around the knots underneath
the soft polish.
You tried to be quiet, but I could hear you
making your car noises in your throat.
Maya Jewell Zeller's first full-length collection, Rust Fish ($15), was published by Lost Horse Press. A resident of Spokane, she teaches English at Gonzaga University. Her sensual work is steeped in the natural world and clear-eyed about the humans who move through it. "In this book of poems infused with magic cadences," writes Melissa Kwasny, "Maya Zeller spells the damaged world into sparkle again."
from "I Give You Ten Reasons Why
We Can’t Use Roundup on Our Lawn"
1. As a girl the black-branched plums
behind the far fence were mine because
a giant row of nettle and snowberry
blocked them from the cows. I’d lie in a crook
where many limbs came together
and move my tongue along the sticky tip
of a still-hanging fruit.
2. My palms have been stained
again and again
ripe blackberry pink.
I’ve pressed them to T-shirts
like silk-screened bleeding hearts.
3. Your Jesus
is thin, his eyes dark like lake.
He is hungry. Maybe he’ll drink
the milk from these slim green necks.
4. Barbed Wire and Roundup were both
bastard sons of Zeus. They were banished
to America because, as the god himself put it,
they didn’t seem to have any real
mythical potential.
5. Maybe the grass
is a weed. Then what do you exterminate?
6. My first dream of you
was while lying in a field of golden stems.
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Saturday, June 01, 2013 at 07:30 PM
JAMES ARTHUR, NATALIE DIAZ,
& TOMAS Q. MORIN
This evening we welcome three poets who have recently seen the arrival of their first books and who all have a connection to beloved Copper Canyon Press. James Arthur's collection, Charms Against Lightning ($16), was published by Copper Canyon in 2012. A Hodder Fellow at Princeton University for 2012-2013, he has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, a residency at the Amy Clampitt House, and a Discovery/The Nation Prize. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. His work is crisply lyrical and quietly searing, and we offer you a sample here—
"Song of the Doppelgänger"
I was there, and saw the half-ton rope
of human hair coiled like a python,
glinting. I don’t know when the war was fought,
why, or where it stopped, but believe
in the mighty engine perspiring behind the screen
and as much as I can
in the notion of good. I find less to praise.
I’ve been to the Sinai, to Kiyomizu-dera.
I went to Hiroshima and didn’t cry. I know pretty well
what my promises are worth,
know the worth of material things.
Just this summer I heard a raven sing
and thought of a stone rebounding
down a bottomless jar.
When My Brother Was an Aztec ($16) is the title of Natalie Diaz's first full-length book, also published by Copper Canyon. A Mojave and Pima tribe member, she grew up on the banks of the Colorado River in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she completed a poetry and fiction MFA at Old Dominion University. She lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs a language revitalization program with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language. Her poetry can be fierce, moving, and darkly comic, as shown here—
"Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination
of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation
of a Wild Indian Rezervation"
Angels don't come to the reservation.
Bats, maybe, or owls, boxy mottled things.
Coyotes, too. They all mean the same thing—
death. And death
eats angels, I guess, because I haven't seen an angel
fly through this valley ever.
Gabriel? Never heard of him. Know a guy named
Gabe though—
he came through here one powwow and
stayed, typical
Indian. Sure he had wings,
jailbird that he was. He flies around in stolen cars.
Wherever he stops,
kids grow like gourds from women's bellies.
Like I said, no Indian I've ever heard of has ever been
or seen an angel.
Maybe in a Christmas pageant or something—
Nazarene church holds one every December,
organized by Pastor John's wife. It's no wonder
Pastor John's son is the angel—everyone knows angels
are white.
Quit bothering with angels, I say. They're no good
for Indians.
Remember what happened last time
some white god came floating across the ocean?
Truth is, there may be angels, but if there are angels
up there, living on clouds or sitting on thrones across
the sea wearing
velvet robes and golden rings, drinking whiskey from
silver cups,
we're better off if they stay rich and fat and ugly and
'xactly where they are—in their own distant heavens.
You better hope you never see angels on the rez.
If you do, they'll be marching you off to
Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they've
mapped out for us.
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of A Larger Country ($14), which was awarded the APR/Honickman First Book Prize and published by American Poetry Review, and is distributed by Copper Canyon Press. A Texas native, he received an MFA from Texas State University, and an MA from Johns Hopkins University. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He teaches literature and writing at Texas State University. Tom Sleigh, who selected A Larger Country for the award, has described Morín as "a poet who has something to say, and who has found the odd and exact and new way of saying it." By example, we offer this—
"Our Prophets"
It shouldn’t have surprised me while reading
Gorky’s remembrance of Tolstoy and
devouring chicken
on a blanket in view of the muddy waters
that I should see a parakeet misnamed
the Quaker parrot
by some scientist poet with a sense of humor,
not to mention fashion, because he found modesty
in the way their lime color drapes over
their backs and down each wing in a way that
reminds one of a key-lime pie; though not
the one with the dome of meringue which resembles
the dress of a house finch, rather the wobbly
body of the sad supermarket doppelganger;
the impostor with the God-awful filling
tinted green by they of the white aprons
and soufflé hats who no doubt assume we
are all children
of Truth and would thus not know how to suffer
a yellow-white pie with lime in its name;
much less something important like the rapture
that came and went last week
for which the stores baked a special angel food cake
labeled Manna and stuffed with so many
mulberries it bled through; and no one I know
vanished
and perhaps it was a rapture that extinguished
the tribe of Attsurs from which the parrot came
that Tolstoy recounts to Gorky as possessing
the last traces of the history of its lost people
in its sickled tongue. And how long did it take
the Attsur
scholar after he took the bird home, fed it dates
and schnitzel from his own lips, to translate
the precious words for “mama” and “wine,”
“kitty” and “bye-bye,” and when the rapture
comes again
tomorrow and we finally vanish as predicted
what bird will speak for us if not our monkish
parakeet souring in the oak above us
like a cheap piece of pie
that calls out “hungry, hungry, hungry”?
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Friday, June 07, 2013 at 07:30 PM
MARY SZYBIST
Mary Szybist joins us to read from her stunning new book, Incarnadine ($15 Graywolf Press). An associate professor of English at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregon, she earned degrees from the University of Virginia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first collection of poetry, Granted, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The poetry in Incarnadine offers a startlingly fresh and elegant meditation on the twining of the spiritual and the physical. Threaded throughout the collection are poems reimagining the annunciation, examining the transformational glory and terror that must come with such a visitation. This is a book remarkable in its grace and fearlessness.
"Hail"
Mary who mattered to me, gone or asleep
among fruits, spilled
in ash, in dust, I did not
leave you. Even now I can't keep from
composing you, limbs and blue cloak
and soft hands. I sleep to the sound
of your name, I say there is no Mary
except the word Mary, no trace
on the dust of my pillowslip. I only
dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets,
of honeybees above you
murmuring into a crown. Antique queen,
the night dreams on: here are the pears
I have washed for you, here the heavy-winged doves,
asleep by the hyacinths. Here I am,
having bathed carefully in the syllables
of your name, in the air and the sea of them,
the sharp scent
of their sea foam. What is the matter with me?
Mary, what word, what dust
can I look behind? I carried you a long way
into my mirror, believing you would carry me
back out. Mary, I am still
for you, I am still a numbness for you.
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Friday, June 21, 2013 at 07:30 PM
MICHAEL COLLIER
We're delighted to snare a reading by Michael Collier during his stop in Seattle. His most recent collection, An Individual History ($25.95), was published in 2012 by W.W. Norton. He is the author of five earlier volumes, including The Ledge, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at the University of Maryland and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Intelligent, haunting, and laced with wit, the poetry of his new book is a graceful evocation of the individual within personal and public history.
"Days in Paradise"
The bird was on the wire and then it wasn’t,
though the wire still stretched from pole to pole.
You saw it perched and still, except for the defensive
tilt of head, the tail feather flickering alert
and silhouetted through the setting sun.
You saw the sun set the eucalyptus trees on fire
and burn the land that once was sea.
You saw the sea in tides of dust and sand
that swept across dry fields and vacant lots
and in flocks of gulls and stranded pelicans.
You saw it in the cloudless days, the house trailers
anchored in their parks
and palm trees, like massive tube worms,
waving in the sky.
You saw its shadow sweep across
the broad flat avenues
laid out in grids, in the bare mountains that
ringed the valley,
the citrus groves bulldozed for houses. You smelled it
in the irrigation ditches and canals, the flooded
playing fields
and golf courses. The bird was on the wire, the land
had once been sea: Go ahead, I urged my friend,
who’d been showing off
his father’s pellet gun and knew exactly what I meant.
Go ahead! It felt good to say the thing that
needed saying,
to hear the barrel’s pfft of air, to see the pistol’s blur
as it recoiled.
The wire stretched from pole to pole, the sun
set everything on fire.
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