Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/09/2017
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Location
Powell's City of Books
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Three poets present their new collections: Dena Rash Guzman with Joseph (Hologram Press), Leah Noble Davidson with Door (University of Hell Press), and Stephen Lackaye with Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape (Unicorn Press).
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Joseph (Hologram Press)
A howl billowing up from love’s underworld, Joseph tells the story of passion pitted against patriarchy. Its speaker shifts shapes as she spins her tale: she is mother, mistress, witness, wife, sorceress, nurse, and rebel. She is Joseph’s greatest scourge and his most tenacious survivor.
This book declares that a woman’s capacity for constant change — a timeworn weapon in the misogynist’s arsenal — anoints and serves her refusal to be silenced. The poems themselves veer between domestic, natural, and surreal spaces. After all, love and war have always kept each other company, whether in the forest, the kitchen, or the ether. Joseph himself never appears, but through these psalms of panic, politics, romance, and gore, we trace his missteps with a fascination both forensic and tender.
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Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape (Unicorn Press)
In Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape, Stephen Lackaye explores post-industrial disquiet in the Rust Belt. The figures in his poems try to reckon a subtle menace that lingers just beyond sure sight. A man who knows he is being watched contemplates the life of his voyeur. A laborer returning home hears a trap clap shut on someone in the woods and wonders if he can save the victim — if there is indeed someone to save. A youth recollects his early education in hand-to-hand combat, unsure of what violence he was ever capable of. Lackaye anneals these stories in a bright lyrical fire. These poems prompt us to distinguish the darkness within from the darkness without, to recover from the ruinous landscape the outlines of one’s own self.