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Open Books: Event Archive
January 22, 2008 07:30 PM
LANA HECHTMAN AYERS & KATHLEEN HALME
Lana Hechtman Ayers is a busy and appreciated member of the Seattle area poetry community, where she serves as an editor, publisher, and reading series curator. She is also an active writer, who saw two of her collections published in 2007. Dance from Inside My Bones ($15 Snake Nation), a book that addresses loss and endurance with honesty and warmth, was published early in the year. Just released is the intriguingly named Chicken Farmer I Still Love You ($14 D-N Publishing). The title comes from graffiti she spied and gives a sense of the passionate, realistic, yet hopeful poems within. Love is a focus of the book, and though it is “the infinite dictionary,” it too often, she reveals, “is synonymous with end.” Still, as the closing poem suggests, there remains the possibility for beauty and joy, that somehow “each fractured / one of us / shines.”
The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Kathleen Halme joins us from Portland, Oregon, to read from her third collection, Drift and Pulse ($14.95 Carnegie Mellon), a book that thrums with life observed and contemplated. The mind doing both so vividly here is equally attuned to science and song, with a “longing for shapes as elegant as instinct.” Indeed, the mind, that “three-pound storm,” is itself an object of contemplation— “A brain knows what it needs. / I pray I am myself, / a non-religious prayer.” These are lyrical poems that glint with an intelligent edge— “Did you expect the truth? Why? / Any core sample of the universe / is fiction on the front and back and sides, / the same story: we sublimed, we died.”
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