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Open Books: Event Archive
February 24, 2008 03:00 PM
J.W. MARSHALL
We’ve got some celebrating to do! J.W. Marshall (aka John), one half of Open Books’s ownership and staff, reads from his first full-length collection, Meaning a Cloud ($15.95 Oberlin). Winner of the 2007 Field Prize, the book includes two slide-show-like narrative sequences: one concerning his hospitalization after being hit by a car – “There was this hospital / that came into my life / at the end of an ambulance” – the other concerning time spent with his mother, institutionalized after suffering a stroke. Though the topics appear grim, the writing is not without humor – “The library door’s hard to get through / for the mother, son, wheel-chair stew / but there’s a limerick book / and we each like to look / at the one that rhymes rescue with screw you.” A third section consists of individual poems written out of awareness of various social systems – bus-ridership, marriage, commerce, life during distant and abstract wartime. A reception follows this reading. (John will also read this spring on Orcas Island, in Bellingham, Spokane, and Walla Walla, and in the fall in Michigan and Ohio. E-mail him for more information about these and other possible events at jwmarshall52 at gmail dot com.)
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