Kevin Simmonds and Jessie Lendennie
Mon. Sept. 12 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Emmanuel Sigauke
Kevin Simmonds is a writer, musician and filmmaker originally from New Orleans. His books include Mad for Meat (2011), Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets in Faith, Religion & Spirituality (2011) and Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof (2012). He wrote the music for the Emmy Award-winning documentary HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica, and Thunder in the Egg, a project about Haiti, commissioned by the Pulitzer Center, which debuted at the 2011 National Black Theatre Festival. He divides his time between San Francisco and Japan.
Certainty
Without traveling to Nashville
I still know that a boy there falls
piecemeal
into women’s clothes
that in New Orleans
those overtaken by the water
rose inside
that water
Jehovah smells of mint?
Allah of gunpowder?
No
Even I recognize love failing
in ways it must
Jessie Lendennie is co-founder and Managing Director of Salmon Poetry Ltd, established in 1981; Ireland’s most prolific poetry publisher. Her poetry collections are Daughter and Other Poems (2002) and Walking Here (2011). She has edited several anthologies, including Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology and Poetry: Reading It, Writing It, Publishing It.
Grattan Strand, Galway
Walking here
has become my life;
the air, the light,
clouds like the softest
frosted breath;
the first autumn.I have been here
Long before the air
Smelt of change….And every mood
Has its vision…
The horizon is both
This path
And the edge of the seaAnd my life is bound
By every early morning,
Wanting to be here,
Wanting to be gone.
Jessie Lendennie’s appearance made possible by Culture Ireland
