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Open Books: Readings
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June 2009
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4 CHRIS FORHAN & ALESSANDRA LYNCH
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16 JOSHUA BECKMAN
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18 VICTORIA CHANG
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28 A READING FOR THE BIRDS
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July 2009
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Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 07:30 PM
PETER LUDWIN & MICHAEL SPENCE
Peter Ludwin’s first full-length book, A Guest in All Your Houses ($13.95 Word Walker), is a love song for the people and land of the Southwest and Mexico. The landscape’s harshness (“I must gather enough of me up / to make it through winter”) and beauty (“a light that changed my life, / the desert beyond melting from bleached / to butter gold, lavender to mauve”) take on spiritual elements. His poems make clear his regard for and interest in the breadth of the area’s populace, from bikers to artists to the indigenous people, whose sometimes curtness he sees as “the roll call of massacres.”
Michael Spence’s Crush Depth ($15.95 Truman State) is a collection of skillfully realized and emotionally open poems concerning father-son and man-among-men relationships. Both Spence and his father served in the Navy, and he tells their stories of the complexities of military life in peacetime as well as in wartime with an eye for detail and an ear tuned to rhyme and rhythm. “His hitch / is ending, I object. Stokes gets the brig, / the captain grins… or he re-ups.” The metaphoric value of literal ships is put to fine use in these poems -- “Many things can show you how thin / your hull always was.”
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Thursday, June 04, 2009 at 07:30 PM
CHRIS FORHAN & ALESSANDRA LYNCH
Chris Forhan’s new book, Black Leapt In ($16.95 Barrow Street), offers a collection of richly nuanced, deeply felt poems concerning sudden loss and gradual change. Forhan’s father died when he was quite young, a shock that ripples through the book. In the opening sequence, the father’s death is addressed as directly as lyricism affords, with elegant and unusual writing -- “It is possible to be born a prince / and slip into each day as into a golden robe. / It is possible to feel your chest fill with ash.” The self-perception in these poems is dry -- “it’s something, to have been inadequate / and made it look like stubbornness” -- an approach resulting in strongly emotional work mercifully without pathos.
In Alessandra Lynch’s second collection, It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight ($16.95 Pleiades), an often elegiac toughness is made lively by original, even playful language. Her poems encompass a wide variety of experience, from adolescence (“what she could not / grasp grasped her”) to a summer motorcycle rally (“wet T-shirts on at ten”) to the utterly surreal (“Drink it all said maroon to red. / Bolster it up said navy to violet.”). Her metaphors are surprising, and her voice is comforting in its shared awareness of our human foibles, as when a picnicking narrator finds deflated balloons “grounded after such short drifts of purposelessness / wherein they’d pressed up / the air, swell-headed and empirical.”
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Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at 07:30 PM
JOSHUA BECKMAN
There’s not much narrative in Joshua Beckman’s fifth collection of poems, Take It ($14 Wave Books), but there is most definitely a narrator -- a voice captivating in language and thought that can puff along with antiquated mannerisms and then deflate itself with a contemporary sharpness. At times a quirky echo of centuries earlier letters or travel diaries, this compulsively readable book presents an observer of, well, humanity -- and the speaker most prominent among the observed. The poems are intimate and inclusive despite their often unexplained or clearly whimsical locales and participants. Through this vigorous voice (voices?) comes a fresh, tender poetry -- “Packs of boar were trampling in the / moonlight some needle or piece of shit / that the earth needed pushed into it. / God has made this hotel in his image. / The fluctuation of life. Yes. Yes, / I understand folly, we’re the creatures / he explained that to.”
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Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 07:30 PM
VICTORIA CHANG
A remarkable strength underpins Victoria Chang’s visceral second collection, Salvinia Molesta ($16.95 Univ. of Georgia). Its often difficult subjects -- the darker side of 20th century Chinese history, infidelity, contemporary corporate corruption -- are presented fearlessly with poetic grace. Powerful imagery makes hard facts vivid, as in these lines from “Seven Stages of Genocide,” -- “near the covered ditches, only / an ocean keeps confessing / starfish to shore.” The title poem begins with an exploration of “the world’s worst weed,” then shifts its attention to the world of high finance, where the author worked, and to a former boss who was accused and acquitted of obstruction of justice, a piece that deftly illuminates the complexities of desire -- “I wanted a blue shirt like his. // I wanted objects but not their shadows.” Throughout the collection she faces her topics without flinching -- “I am gardening, but my mind is tilling.”
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Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 03:00 PM
A READING FOR THE BIRDS
Some years ago, Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser began compiling an anthology of bird poems. The result is The Poets Guide to the Birds, ($22 Anhinga), a gathering of 151 poems from 137 contemporary American poets, a poetic sky filled with vireos, whippoorwills, falcons, gulls, larks, and many more species. Here are the heron, as envisioned by Jane Hirshfield, who “slept / with his long neck / folded, like a letter / put away,” and the sparrow, who “is / his hunger organized,” as Wendell Berry so neatly puts it. To celebrate the publication of this rich anthology, Ms. Kitchen joins us to read from it this afternoon, along with contributors Duane Niatum, Rick Barot, Christianne Balk, Pamela Gross, and Stan Sanvel Rubin. To honor the anthology’s subjects, Open Books will donate a minimum of 10% of the day’s sales to the Seattle Audubon Society.
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