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Open Books: Event Archive
May 16, 2006 07:30 PM
JEANNINE HALL GAILEY & MARTHA SILANO
This reading features two local poets with new books from ex-Seattleite Tom Hunley's Steel Toe Books. Becoming the Villainess ($12), Ms. Gailey's book, offers a range of female voices and stories, from a seven-year-old learning to shoot a rifle to comic book heroines and Greek mythological characters. Mixing wit and emotion, and setting the classical next to the pop, her work finds rage and (surprising) kindness in the powerless, the powerful, and those striving for power. From the poem "In the Faces of Lichtenstein's Women" -- "In this world, / the noise from a gun floats forever." Ms. Silano's Blue Positive ($12) is a forceful account of love, sex, pregnancy, and birth. The vocabulary in her poetry is unusually rich, particularly when concerned with the natural world. Defining the word "torrent" for her young son she comes to "violence purely, refreshingly / amoral.." With the word "refreshingly" Ms. Silano proves her willingness to embrace destruction as a force in the world, a hard earned embrace. Several of these poems address the profound strife and sadness of postpartum psychosis. "This god is taking me, one rung at a time, one ambulance, / one EMT strapping me in, throwing me off this earth...." Her poems often read like torrents of language re-making a landscape. Couple that with her emotional risks and assurances and the result is a collection of striking and refreshing vitality.
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