Calendar Home
Previous Reading:
« JOSHUA COREY & RICHARD GREENFIELD
Next Reading:
JOSHUA BECKMAN »
|
|
Open Books: Event Archive
April 05, 2005 07:30 PM
CHRIS FORHAN & REBECCA HOOGS
Tonight's event brings together a former Washingtonian and a current
Seattleite to share their work. Chris Forhan's most recent collection, The
Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, received both the 2003 Morse Poetry Prize
from Northeastern University Press and the 2004 Washington State Book Award.
His wry and thoughtful poems embrace both the mundane and the cosmic, often
in one smooth gesture, and reveal not only the world itself but the way the
mind works to grasp the world. "Let me / not hear myself think," he writes
in "Quiet Hours," "let me shush / the sleepless soprano in me with the silk
dress, / the wee missionary with his Bible and bullhorn. // Let it quit: in
the kitchen, garage, yard, where a wind- / nudged pinecone thumps softly
onto the lawn, / another answer to a question I haven't asked."
Rebecca Hoogs is the author of the just published chapbook Grenade from
GreenTower Press. Music and subtle wordplay give a shimmer to her poems,
like light off water. Indeed, in "San Fruttuoso," where a submerged figure
of Christ draws tourists, she lyrically paints the scene at water's edge --
"children tipping each other from boats; / echo off the harbor walls,
arresting siesta; // old woman, echo of the lovely once, sinking / into
sand, sunning the two large tears // of her breasts; divers, all who dive,
emerging / blessed. And us? Dry; just holding our breath." Her work is
rendered with care, cool appraisal, and, at times, humor.
|
|
