| Event Archive |
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Open Books: Readings
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May 2008
1 JOHN BURGESS
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8 ELIZABETH BRADFIELD, SEAN HILL, & JASMINE DREAME WAGNER
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13 JOHN OLSON
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June 2008
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2 RAYMOND MCDANIEL
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Thursday, May 01, 2008 at 07:30 PM
JOHN BURGESS
This evening marks the launch of John Burgess’s second collection, A History of Guns in the Family ($12.95 Ravenna Press), a gathering of haiku-like poems, ballads, and snapshot narratives. His work can be quietly philosophical -- “it takes / know-how / how not / to paint sky” -- and vigorously descriptive -- “Christ you drowned it she / bitched. Too much water / in her whiskey ditch. How // disgust smolders. / Her cigarette left lit / edge of kitchen table.” By turns political, humorous, and moving, this is beat-Zen-blues-infused poetry, its language spare -- “pine pines / boughs bow” -- and tumbling -- “unstop what stops this glottal stop,” equal parts grit and tenderness. The first 150 copies of the book include a CD of the author reading a number of the poems.
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Thursday, May 08, 2008 at 07:30 PM
ELIZABETH BRADFIELD, SEAN HILL, & JASMINE DREAME WAGNER
We’re pleased to be a stop on the West Coast tour for these three traveling and quite active poets. Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Interpretive Work ($20, Red Hen Press), the first book from the press’s Arktoi imprint, established by Eloise Klein Healy to encourage the voices of lesbian authors, and a collection the publisher explains, “explores the collision of natural history, work, queerness, and family.” A naturalist, teacher, web designer, as well as the founder and editor of Broadsided, a computer-based broadside press, Ms. Bradfield is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Sean Hill’s first collection, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor ($16.95 Univ. of Georgia Press), chronicles the African American community in his hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, across two centuries, a volume Kevin Young calls “a transcendent debut.” The recipient of numerous awards, Mr. Hill is a Stegner Fellow as well. Jasmine Dreame Wagner’s limited edition chapbook, Charcoal, was commissioned by the Window Gallery and, as she describes the work, “surveys and deconstructs the language and visual field of the American urban ruin.” A visual artist and musician as well as a poet, Ms. Wagner performs in the experimental folk collective Cabinet of Natural Curiosities.
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Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 07:30 PM
JOHN OLSON
When it comes to describing his work, since it seems to be as much a force
of nature as anything else, one is best served by stepping out of the way
and letting Mr. Olson describe it. To wit: "The exhilaration of poetry is in
its gall, its brassy irrelevance and gunpowder vowels, its pulleys and
popcorn and delirious birds. It is transcendent yet wild, a while of energy
in a shell of words." His Backscatter: New and Selected Poems ($18.95
Black Widow) was published this year and is cause for this celebratory
reading. Mr. Olson was an early winner of The Stranger's Genius Grant and is
well-known in Seattle's, and the nation's, experimental writing communities.
Prose poetry is his primary form, and he has written of the prose poem that
it is "as inclusive as possible... an anomaly so wanton and supple the words
dream themselves into a torrent of unbridled rhythms, irrepressible being."
The words in his pieces come as if from a controlled explosion in a
dictionary warehouse. Giddiness and pathos stream past. Images and ideas fly
by, too. Synapses go snapping when reading or listening to John Olson. There
is such pleasure in that.
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Monday, June 02, 2008 at 07:30 PM
RAYMOND MCDANIEL
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