October 6 Reading: Mariah's Pick

Susanna Childress will be reading at Beaverdale Books on Thursday, October 6th at 7pm.  Here is a poem from her new book Entering the House of Awe.

Torn

            Recently a friend admitted his fear of birds, how

                        as a child he’d meant to rescue a fallen robin,

                                                                                                  had reached up

to return the bird when a grey sprawl of lice

                                                                        left its body

            and scattered on his hand, so he dropped the bird and ran.

                                                                                                          It made me

                                    think of you, the way a grown man relives

his ancient anxieties more vividly with time—that field

                        of sorghum stretching before my friend

                                                                                      like the rest of his life, each

white cedar humming under its scabs of bark,

                                                                       branches promising

            oriel, blackbird, grackle as he flapped the lice from his arm.

                                                                                                         It may

                    be true, that even the smallest deaths are mother

to beauty, but you spared your children stories of their grandparents launching

        plates at each other, of LA gang fights,

                                                                     you traded your buddy’s

        blown-off face in Nha Trang for the kneaded silence of its truth

                        beneath your red red sangre:

                                                                    you knew what it was to fear,

                                                                                                                you let me

        believe man is good, the four chambers of the heart

                     more like a cow’s prodigious stomachs than the cavities

of a pistol.

                I crawled beneath your knees to watch

                        cop shows on TV,

                                                     hollered my long midnights

when the closet kicked with deer,

                                                    the woman’s ears bled bees,

                                                                                                the neighbor boy

            clamped his penis against my cheekbone at someone’s

                         birthday while upstairs they pinned the tail on the donkey—

green and blue balloons floated down, popped

                                                                        at his elbows. My friend says,

A bird’s most terrifying

                                    feature is its tongue—blanched, cracked—think of it

            coming straight for your face.

                                    I mean to laugh

            a little, his arms raised, fingers aimed at my eyes

like claws.

                Instead I hear myself gasp, as though I could begin

              to understand this, his personal horror.

                                                                         I cannot. I think

           

              of Philomela—human turned nightingale

                        whose tongue, torn ragged like the kitchen curtain,

continued to sing.

                           Papi, how could you know that balloons,

                                                                                          to this day, loose

            my bowels? I never told you.

                                                         I swore it was a dream.  

Get to Know the Poets: Susanna Childress, Oct. 6

Susanna Childress holds a Master’s from The University of Texas at Austin and a PhD from Florida State University. Her first book, Jagged with Love, was awarded the Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from the University of Southern Illinois-Carbondale. She has received an AWP Intro Journals Award, the National Career Award in Poetry from the National Society of Arts and Letters, and a Lilly post-doctoral fellowship. She lives in Holland, Michigan.


We asked Susanna a few questions in anticipation of her reading with Stacey Waite on October 6--here's what she told us:

YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like? 

SC: Um, I'm a big fan of L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables; probably the attraction is sentimental nostalgia from my childhood/adolescence but I do love going back to those books and reading over Anne's dialogue and mischief. She's so strange and spunky and treacly. I do love her. 

YAPRS: Is there an author whom most poetry-lovers probably haven't read, but whom you think they should read?

SC: I can't pretend to know who poetry-lovers have and haven't read, as I can't keep up with who's in and who's out and all that, but I would suggest Robinson Jeffers for anyone who is interested in environmental concerns and how those concerns were voiced by an idealistic, "outsider" poet way back at mid-century. He's Whitmanesque (but angrier) and has influenced most of the ecopoets today even if slightly unacknowledged (I know he was championed by Dana Gioia but I still don't hear much about him or his influence today)...

YAPRS: If you were stuck in an Iowa blizzard with any one person in the world, who would it be and why? 

SC: I'm afraid of famous people; I'm even afraid of people I admire, so I think I'd like to be stuck in a blizzard with my husband and my son--I know that's two people, but they're sort of one "unit"--because we could sing and read and make pancakes and watch movies and stay warm together and I wouldn't feel an inch of discomfort or oddness. 

YAPRS: To what do you aspire in your writing? 

SC: Transporting the reader. 

YAPRS: What drives you and/or your poetry?

SC: I'm terrified of being erased, whether by circumstance or my own mortality; what drives me is knowing I am a thinking, feeling, dervish-whirling human being--I need to get it down, as a record and a remembrance, of who I am, who I was, who I'm becoming... 

YAPRS: If you weren’t a poet, what would you be? 

SC: A patient in a mental hospital. 

October 6 Reading: Jennifer's Pick

Here's a preview from Susanna Childress' new book, Entering the House of Awe:

Instructions for the Twitterpated, Nightingaled, and Sore in Love

           Begin by throwing something away: the microwave,

for example. This will be easier after the crimson hibiscus

fall from where you hung them to dry, their huge corolla spilled

like dark tortillas and your own ticking pulse

won’t stop you from sagging to the floor with a heady,

comprehensive loss, those flowers you strung up by the broom

stunningly ruined, their long stems, too, snapped like the legs

of a praying mantis.                 After this, sweep your arm

across the cupboards and fill a canvas sack with the butter pickles

and wheat germ nobody bothered to open, the prize-winning box

of cereal, the spindled cheese grate. Whatever you do, do not

toss the egg shells, which, after having broken each open,

you returned to the carton like a dozen viscous sockets

that might yet sing. Run your fingers over their fractured edges

and don’t be surprised if you’ve never touched

such a thing, parchment-thin, specked with the memory of locust,

millet, wind, now crooked halves of a yolky hollow,

cupped grottos of sound you’ve become deaf to, ears dwarfed

with your own importance—to thy high requiem become a sod—

so that when you’re standing here with me, wondering

what you’ll do without the toaster oven and why my face

is an insouciant cheddar pink, you must offer the old knife with one hand

and arch my back with the other. Watch me slice open two avocados

and with palpable shock behold their pits, so beautiful

that after you leapfrog the gates of heaven and get a good look

at God’s knuckles it’s these you’ll recall, not the trash bin,

not the emptied palms, goose bumped with secret. For now,

stand still a decent while: turn your hand over, let them go.

Check out more of Susanna's work at the YAPRS reading at Beaverdale Books on Thursday, October 6th at 7pm.

Poetry Staff Pick with Vlad

It was hard to pick which of Stacey's poems I liked best, but I finally fixed on this one as just one of my favorites.


Fixing My Voice
When Dr. Rosen says he can “fix my voice,” he means
he will give me shots of estrogen that will surge through
my body like electric shocks, sending the hair on my chin
and stomach running for cover. He doesn’t want me to be warm.
He doesn’t want to listen to my large truck voice
fill his office like his soy milk
bursting up from his coffee’s deep bottom.
He wants to imagine me as an affirmation.
He wants me perched upon his plastic table
with my smooth naked legs, singing hymns
in the voice of a woman who needs him
in order to recover some piece of herself
that has been swallowed by the jaws of testosterone,
opening and closing hard like the doors of angry lovers.
He doesn’t exactly know that he hates me,
the feeling is more like gender indigestion,
how the sound of my voice keeps rising
up in his throat and he can’t rid himself
of the image of my lover who stretches out
nude in the dark bed, presses her hand
above my chest saying,
“talk to me, please, talk.”


-Stacey Waite

If you want to hear more of Stacey's unique and powerful writing, please join us at Beaverdale Books on Oct. 6 at 7pm for our next reading!

Poetry Pick with Kelsey, Part 2

Okay, so I couldn't pick just one...

A Poem in Response to Those Who Argue that my Desire
            to Purposefully Remove my Breasts is an Anti-Feminist Notion

Keep in mind I weigh a buck eighty five 

and this is not about a desire for less flesh 

Keep in mind that celebrating womanhood is a trap 

and that the men’s shirts I like to wear 

are not conducive to a breast environment

Admit that it is your body that you want me to celebrate 

that in fact you want my assurance that your own breasts 

are a part of your picture ID card at the woman club.

What a paradise it is to not think in halves but tops and bottoms 

I’m all man on the top and woman on the bottom 

see how that works, all man on the top and woman on the bottom

You may want to inquire about my mind, after all, 

we wouldn’t want my mind to me male and it happens to be on top 

Mind on top, woman on the bottom 

See how that works? 

Mind on top and woman on the bottom.

My mind is not a man. In fact, my mind 

hates my man because my man is trying to be on top 

and mind is on top, mind has to be on top

You still want to me to tell you what I would call myself then 

being all man on the top and woman on the bottom 

You still want me to name it, to name 

what my vagina and breast-less chest

would mean or be called, and I say, You do it. After all, 

it is you who have been naming me all along.

                                -Stacey Waite

Come hear Stacey Waite and Susanna Childress read their poetry October 6 at 7pm in Beaverdale Books! The reading is FREE and open to the public. "Like" us on Facebook at Younger American Poets Reading Series for more information about upcoming readings!

October 6 Reading: Poetry Pick with Kelsey

Poem for my First Girlfriend

Jessie fell through me 
like wind slipping through a screen,

the way hands push through water. 

For sixteen years before we met, 

I never knew the feel of my own body, 

how I might look at myself 

if I had entertained the possibility 

of not lying beneath 

but lying with, one sound— 

no ocean for the shell to hold.

                -Stacey Waite 

Thank you Rick and Sandy Soria!

Rather than having our poets stay overnight in a hotel, we thought it might be fun to send them away for a night. Now, we're able to do so. Thanks to Rick and Sandy Soria, our poets will be staying in one of the century-old farms of Iowa for the night. We think they'll really enjoy this!

Thanks again, Sorias. Without your donation this Fall, we might have had some unhappy poets sleeping on couches.

Thank you Ace Body & Motor!

Thanks to Ace Body & Motor, a locally owned auto repair shop in Des Moines, our first reading on September 1 was a success!

Find yourself needing body or motor work? Check out Ace Body & Motor on NE 45th Street. While using their free Wi-Fi and drinking complimentary coffee, you can wait for Larry, Keith, and Jason (and the rest of the guys) to take a look at your car. See more at their website: www.acebodyandmotor.com or "like" them on Facebook at Ace Body & Motor for more information, special deals, and the occasional car tip from Larry!

Thanks again AB&M!

Get to Know the Poets: Stacey Waite, Oct. 6

Stacey Waite is originally from Long Island, New York. S/he majored in English at Bucknell University and earned an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. S/he now teaches as an Assistant Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Waite has published three collections of poems: the lake has no saint (Tupelo Press, 2010), winner of the Snowbound Prize in Poetry; Love Poem to Androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2007); and Choke (Thorngate Road, 2004), winner of the Frank O’Hara Prize. A new book, Butch Geography, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2012.

YAPRS asked Stacey a few questions in anticipation of her October 6th reading with Susanna Childress:

YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like?
SW: The saddest part of trying to answer this question is how predicable my reading tastes are. I can't think of a single book that would be all that surprising. But perhaps it would be surprising to know that I am embarrassingly compelled by the show Project Runway, and that any time I see Fun Dip, I feel the need to have some.

YAPRS: Is there an author whom most poetry-lovers probably haven't read, but whom you think they should read?
SW: Well, it's hard to say what poets people might or might not know about (my goodness I am being very evasive of these questions) but I think lots of poets should read Antonio Porchia, and a book by Carol Potter called A Short History of Pets.

YAPRS:To what do you aspire in your writing?
SW: I know a lot of poets who say they write for themselves or even for the poems themselves, but the truth is for me that writing has always been about connection, about trying to connect with the world outside the poem, about trying to bring queer lives, queer epistemologies and queer bodies into view, about trying to make the world more bearable for those of us who fall outside the sanctioned categories for being. It's not that I believe in some romantic notion that poetry can change the world, it's more that worlds can change inside poems, and sometimes that's all the possibility we need, at least for the moment.

YAPRS: What drives you and/or your poetry?
SW: I think the answer to this question changes quite often. But I think, for this moment, my poems are driven by my own desire to say something meaningful, something terrible, something beautiful, something queer, something completely unlike the last thing I said. And when I fail to say something meaningful, I just try to enjoy the music of having failed.

YAPRS: If you weren’t a poet, what would you be?
SW: I always wanted to be a musician (yes, this is another cliche of poet as failed rockstar), but in all honesty, I bet if I weren't a poet, I'd probably want to be a carpenter, but then I'd realize how much math is involved. So maybe a postman (I am drawn to uniforms and task completion). Or, maybe a wildlife chainsaw artist. Those guys turn dying trees into birds, into hands, into mailboxes. Again, with the mail. Postman. Postman it is.