Poets Laureate Poetry Reading
Poets Laureate Poetry Reading Featuring:
Jenny Browne
Octavio Quintanilla
Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson
Carmen Tafolla
MARCH 4TH – TWIG BOOKSHOP READING – SAINT JULIAN PRESS
Readers include:
PRAISE for THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT BEING AN EPISCOPALIAN
PRAISE for HUNGER FOR SALT
Melissa Studdard's high-flying, bold poetic language expresses an erotic appetite for the world: "this desire to butter and eat the stars," as she says, in words characteristically large yet domestic, ambitious yet chuckling at their own nerve.
In a haunting and, ultimately, stunning, sequence of poems in varied lyrical forms, Wendy Barker's Gloss develops a narrative that poses questions about her mother's unusual, seemingly privileged, British background. The poems of this gripping book are punctuated by short syllabic meditations on a Chinese scroll picturing a lone man paddling up a long river toward mountains.
The poetry of a feminist woman of faith, The Long Grass counters the losses endemic to our broken lives--beset by climate change, childhood abuse, gender stereotype and inequity, death itself--with the reassuring persistence of the natural world and the enduring promise of human love.
Horizon of the Dog Woman powerfully explores the strength of people, especially women, who struggle to find acceptance--in their bodies, in histories, in relationships, or in Indigeneity. These poems invoke the anxieties of outsiders, of those forced to reside in the liminal spaces of our society.
Praise for Aliki Barnstone
“The vividness and beauty of the language emerge in a fresh way . . . with evocative simplicity.” —Robert Alter, professor emeritus of Hebrew and comparative literature, University of California, Berkeley
Poetry. Art. Improvising on the tropes of classic pulp fiction, including genres like crime noir, horror, sci-fi, superhero, espionage, and vigilante, Tony Barnstone's audacious new poems are counterpointed by the mischievous (and blood-splattered) ink drawings of Iranian artist Amin Mansouri.
About the Poets:
Kate Bremer, Marisol Cortez, Rohn Bayes, Judi Youngers, Tina Mollie Fisher, Patricia Keoughan, Cassie Wedding, Sarah Colby, Michael Vecchio, Ruth McArthur, Charlie Whipple, Carol Coffee Reposa, Cindy Huyser, d. ellis phelps
ENCHANTMENT OF THE ORDINARY, edited by John Gorman, features poems which celebrate objects, the things around us in the voices of almost 100 poets. Readers will include SA poets, Linda Simone, Jeanie Sanders, and Jim LaVilla-Havelin, as well as poets from Austin, the Hill Country, and some from Houston.
San Antonio Area Poets include:
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Disability Studies. Parenting. Autism. Collaboration. Docu-poetics. We think we know how our lives should be; we know how words fit together in a sentence. We use tests and benchmarks, charts and graphs, rules and spell-checks, to affirm these truths. Maya--the little girl at the center of this book--confounds such ways of knowing.
An astonishing debut, If I Go Missing is timely, fearless, and necessary. In these poems, Octavio Quintanilla measures displacement with language and grapples with the longing to begin anew, to return to what was left unsaid, undone. Redemption is not always possible in the geography of these poems, but there is always a sense of hope.
About Wendy Barker:
Poets appearing:
Carol Coffee Reposa, Texas State Poet Laureate
Jim LaVilla Havelin, San Antonio Express News Poetry Editor
Patricia Spears Bigelow
Robert Okaji
Jeannie Sanders
Michael Vecchio
Rachel Clark
Rebecca Raphael
d. ellis phelps
And
Brianna Martinez, Texas State University student & flutist will play musical interludes
About Natalia Trevino:
This writer warns us she is a woman like a "Mexican electric fence." And yet between the sheets or between the murmur of the rolling pin, we are trusted to overhear confidences between intimates. It is on the white sheets of this book that a woman's most private confessions are transformed from dirty laundry to poetry luminescent as linen on the line.
