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Grass, Berry 2019

Saturday, October 12 2019
Blue Hour Reading Series with Berry Grass and Raych Jackson
The Whistler

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Let’s get to the point, like water does, rushing to fill all the spaces: this is about liquidity. What fills the spaces isn’t whether or not I am your daughter but whether or not I can afford to be your daughter. There are costs involved.

– Berry Grass, “Accountability”

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Read Berry Grass’s 2019 interview with The University of Arizona Poetry Center:

An Interview with Berry Grass

Berry Grass’ new book, Hall of Waters is out from The Operating System. The book looks at the town of Excelsior Springs, Missouri through the lens of transness, deconstructing the settler colonialism of the Midwest, and a series of meditations on the work of one of Excelsior Spring’s most famous residents, Donald Judd.

“The waters of Excelsior Springs, MO, are sold only in bottles bearing copyright labels; never in cans, jugs or kegs. They are bottled by a process which does not permit them to come in contact with the air from the time they leave the spring until the corks are pulled; all medicinal properties are therefore retained practically unchanged.”

– Berry Grass, “TRUE OR FALSE”

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Gambito, Sarah 2022

Wednesday, May 18, 2022
Blue Hour Reading Series with Sarah Gambito and Joseph Legaspi
Zoom

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I was so afraid. I couldn’t escape it. It was bigger than me and 3 horned. It dashed for me and missed and missed again. It leapt for me in my skirt. I was younger than it. It opened its parent mouth and I could die trying.

– Sarah Gambito, “Citizenship [I was so afraid.]”

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Watch Sarah Gambito’s 2022 reading with Joseph Legaspi at the Chicago Poetry Center:

Sarah Gambito begins at 30:36 minutes.

How much our hands are God’s
to be running fingers over braille cities.
We are this hand pushed through our womb.
Weeping with each other’s blood in our eyes.
I dreamed that I slept with the light on.

– Sarah Gambito, “Yolanda: A Typhoon”

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Watch Sarah Gambito read for the PAWA Arkipelago Reading Series:

Read Sarah Gambito’s interview with Porter House Review:

https://porterhousereview.org/articles/with-our-mouths-open-an-interview-with-sarah-gambito-on-food-and-lyrical-sweetness/

More info on Sarah Gambito⇒

Gamble, Hannah 2014; 2021

Wednesday, October 15, 2014
with Kenyatta Rogers
Chicago Cultural Center
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Reading Series with Hannah Gamble and Mayda Del Valle
Zoom

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Hello, poet. I read your book again today,
and with Houston finally being
what I want it to be (windy
and piled with the bodies of pumpkins)
I have to say I felt
alone. Alone is a proud
and quiet feeling where I am everything
and everything is a cluster of four pumpkin-colored
leaves on a tree still green in October.

– Hannah Gamble, “Neighborhood Beautification”

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Watch Hannah Gamble’s 2021 reading with Mayda Del Valle at the Chicago Poetry Center:

Hannah Gamble begins at 6:05 minutes.

Read Hannah Gamble’s Interview with Ghost City Press:

Hannah Gamble – Ghost City Press

Hannah Gamble, interviewed by Blake Wallin One of my favorite things about Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast is how conceptually rich the poems are yet how the reader is forced to find contexts for them at the same time. What were your influences while writing your first bo

Listen to Hannah Gamble, with Kenyatta Rodgers, read for the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Six Points Reading Series:

Hannah Gamble begins reading at 20:42 minutes.

A little ways above the hands
the mouths spoke together
but for two
different reasons,
like the music was behaving
but the orchestra was broken.

– Hannah Gamble, “It Was Alive, Though Differently”

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More info on Hannah Gamble⇒

Gray, Jan-Henry 2019

Wednesday, April 26, 2019
Six Points Reading Series with Jan-Henry Gray, Xan Phillips, and mai c. doan
Women & Children First Bookstore

 

 

It’s easy to
fall in love
with the
grocery store boys—
the one with the
tiny coffee cup
sweatshirt, too-tight
pants & cotton shoes or
the impossibly pale
fish boy who smiles
when he says, I’m
from Alaska.

              – Jan-Henry Gray, “Crush, Supermarket, California”

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The young mother born with the wrong name boards a plane. Flanked by her second and third child, she squeezes the last of the honey from the plastic packet and stirs her tea not with the flimsy stick handed to her by the pink stewardess but with her own stubborn finger ignorant of etiquette or the gossip gathering in the rows behind her.

              – Jan-Henry Gray, “April 1984”

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Griffiths, Rachel Eliza 2015

Thursday, May 7, 2015
with R. A. Villanueva
Chicago Cultural Center

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Another time after she left
I saw a headless woman
hurrying after her like a jaguar.

– Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “Discrepancies Regarding My Mother’s Departure”

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Read this interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths from The Rumpus:

The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths – The Rumpus

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Mule & Pear is one of the most affecting books of poetry I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading

I pick you up
& you are a child made of longing
clasped to my neck. Iridescent,
lovely, your inestimable tantrums,
I carry you back & forth
from the famine in your mind.

– Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “Dear America”

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Watch Rachel Eliza Griffiths read some of her work:

A Four Way Books Salon: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

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Gibson, Regie 1999

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Amazon of song
valkyrie riding astride blue horses
of chanted mystery
you who assassinate
the killer of your
children’s dreams

– Regie Gibson, “Poet Woman”

Broadside of "Poet Woman" by Regie Gibson.

Broadside of “Poet Woman” by Regie Gibson.

Buy this broadside in the Mixed Bag Series⇒

You came through a fissure in the night    Federico
framed in a coat of thorns    Federico
Your frail body a tilde of light
Your body    thin as a bull’s horn

– Regie Gibson, “Federico”

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Listen to this interview with Regie Gibson from Radio Boston:

The Poetry Of Regie Gibson Meets The Saxophone Of Stan Strickland

Boston-based slam poet Regie Gibson performs with saxophonist Stan Strickland.

Watch Regie Gibson perform at TEDxBoston:

Cry havoc | Regie Gibson | TEDxBoston

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. To Thine Own Self Be Hip: a response from Hamlet to young men who have contemplated suicide Former National Poetry Slam Champion Regie Gibson has lectured and performed widely in the U.S., Cuba and Europe and is a recipient of the Absolute Poetry Award.

More info on Regie Gibson⇒

Gordon, Mary

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He hated the way his mother piled the laundry. The way she held the clothes, as if it didn’t matter. And he knew what she would say if he said anything, though he would never say it.

– Mary Gordon, “Temporary Shelter”

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Read Mary Gordon’s short story, “The Deacon,” in The Atlantic Magazine:

The Deacon

If anyone had asked her, Sister Joan would have said that her daily half hour of prayer and meditation provided the most satisfying consolation she could imagine for a world that was random and violent and endlessly inventive in its cruelty toward the weak

Listen to Mary Gordon read from “Circling My Mother” on NPR:


More info on Mary Gordon⇒

Gallagher, Tess 1990

Wednesday, March 28, 1990

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I have had to write this down
in my absence and yours. These
things happen. Thinking
of a voice added
I imagine a sympathy outside us
that protects the message
from what can’t help,
being said.

– Tess Gallagher, “Love Poem to Be Read to an Illiterate Friend”

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Read this interview with Tess Gallagher from Poets&Writers:

An Interview With Tess Gallagher

At the time of this interview, Tess Gallagher had just published Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, which gathered poems from her first three collections, with Graywolf Press. Her most recent book, The Man From Kinvara: Selected Stories, also was published by Graywolf in September 2009. Entire Trees-Douglas Firs, Alders, hemlocks-have washed up onshore.

The sleep of this night deepens
because I have walked coatless from the house
carrying the white envelope.
All night it will say one name
in its little tin house by the roadside.

– Tess Gallagher, “Under Stars”

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Watch Tess Gallagher read her poetry at the Pennsylvania Scranton Public Library in October, 1980:

Friends of the Scranton Public Library Poery Series:Tess Gallagher Part One

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Gunn, Thom 1995

Wednesday, October 11, 1995

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I thought I was so tough,
But gentled at your hands,
Cannot be quick enough
To fly for you and show
That when I go I go
At your commands.

– Thom Gunn, “Tamer and Hawk”

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Listen to Thom Gunn’s Poetry Center of Chicago reading:

Read an interview with Thom Gunn from the Paris Review:

The Art of Poetry No. 72

Thom Gunn 1960 Hampstead-White Stone Pond. Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, on the southern bank of the Thames estuary, in 1929. His childhood was spent mostly in that county, Kent, and in the affluent suburb of Hampstead in northwest London. A relatively happy boyhood was overshadowed firs…

One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!

– Thom Gunn, “My Sad Captains”

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Listen to Thom Gunn read two of his poems:

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