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Open Books: Events
April 11, 2010 03:00 PM
KATHARINE WHITCOMB, NANCY PAGH,
& HOLLY J. HUGHES
This afternoon's reading features the three most recent winners of the annual Floating Bridge Press Poetry Chapbook Award. Katharine Whitcomb's Lamp of Letters offers honed, vibrant poetry of love and grief -- "I wear your diamonds every day though it is over it is over / and the future falls like a falcon on her prize" -- not without wit -- "I am lucky / despite / what the rich may think." Each poem in Nancy Pagh's After rises from a quotation from another poet. The work is often confessional; sharp narratives of anger, regret, and acceptance -- "Imagine / tag of ear on tongue and how much once / I loved his square-tipped fingers fondling // sheets, which means ropes if you know anything / about sailing. He was tentative and I / was ugly and smart." The poetry in Holly Hughes's Boxing the Compass concerns a life of sailing and commercial fishing, its labor and lessons. She shares a hard-earned, quiet knowledge, as in this description of laying a line on deck: "all its lives, / the past firm / in its fibers, / how they intertwine / coil upon coil / circling emptiness, all to make way for the next." The books are each $10.
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