John Gallaher and Rusty Morrison
Monday, Feb. 9 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Sacramento, CA 95816
Host: Tim Kahl
John Gallaher is the author of five books, most recently Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (2011, with GC Waldrep) and In a Landscape (2014), both from BOA Editions. He is the co-editor of The Akron Series in Poetics and The Laurel Review, and the collection Time Is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt.
from In a Landscape I
“Are you happy?” That’s a good place to start, or maybe,
“Do you think you’re happy?” with its more negative
tone. Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes falling. That’s part
of the problem too, but not all of the problem. Flowers out the window
or on the windowsill, and so someone brought flowers.
We spend a long time interested in which way the car would
best go in the driveway. Is that the beginning of an answer?
Some way to say who we are?
Rusty Morrison is the author of Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta); After Urgency (Tupelo) [which won The Dorset Prize]; the true keeps calm biding its story (Ahsahta) [which won The Sawtooth Prize, the Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America]; Whethering (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2004), [which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry]. Book of the Given was published by Noemi Press in 2012. She has received the Bogin, Hemley, Winner, and DiCastagnola Awards from Poetry Society of America. Her poems and/or essays have appeared, or will appear in A Public Space, American Poetry Review, Aufgabe, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Pleiades, Spoon River, The Volta’s Evening Will Come, VOLT, and elsewhere. Her poems have been anthologized in the Norton Postmodern American Poetry 2nd Edition, The Arcadia Project: Postmodern Pastoral, Beauty is a Verb, and The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare and elsewhere. She has been co-publisher (with husband Ken Keegan) of Omnidawn since 2001.
Throw Fallacy
you try again; ball up your fist, the hand with a tiny dove carved from marble
cupped in your carved-marble palm; its curve of as-yet-unused girl-hand frozen
in the want
to be offering whatever it has; you’re too old, throw that;
directing your flashlight beam, ball that up; the increment you need won’t be
what it’s pointing at; no one points fast enough, dark’s still your best history
lesson;
your art may feel time-sensitive
in whatever you set out to investigate, but every avoidance will attach; will be
carried, sucking its placenta, to term; just try throwing that; the good news, all
you’ve missed,
mangled, ruined, mis-rythmed and their serious hair come back —
from The Literary Review
