Lee Herrick and Alice Anderson
Monday April 22 2013 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Lee Herrick is the author of Gardening Secrets of the Dead (WordTech Editions, 2012) and This Many Miles from Desire (WordTech Editions, 2007). His poems have been published widely in literary magazines and anthologies, including The Bloomsbury Review, ZZYZYVA, Berkeley Poetry Review, From the Fishouse online, Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley, 2nd edition, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, and One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form, among others. He is the founding editor of In the Grove and has guest edited various projects, including The Rio Grande Review and New Truths: Writing in the 21st Century by Korean Adoptees, and his narrative essay, “What Is This Thing Called Family?” appears in university textbooks.
He has traveled throughout Latin America and Asia, and he has given readings throughout the United States. He served for seven years on the Board of Directors of the English Council of California Two-Year Colleges. He was born in Daejeon, South Korea, adopted at ten months old, and raised in the East Bay and later, Central California. He lives with his daughter and wife in Fresno, California, where he teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College.
If We Are What We Eat
I am the raw jellied crab
in a small room in Insadong
I am pork browning on the barbecue
the lavender bud under the tongue
I am you and not you, the document
of black ink and number sequences
I am stacks of ham
and the dead scorpion in Beijing
the squid in Incheon, all the blossoms
from the tree in full bloom,
the trees and the bark, the wood
fire, the cold beer,
the fish I want to be but cannot be,
how I am not myself
but I am my skin, my hair,
slivers of black moon like ice.
— Lee Herrick
Alice Anderson’s first book Human Nature (NYU Press, 1994) won both the Elmer Holmes Bobst Prize for Emerging Writers from NYU and the Best First Book Prize from the Great Lakes Colleges Association. Her poems appear in journals such as New York Quarterly, New Letters, Agni, and The Plum Review. Poems are also featured in the anthologies On The Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists; American Poetry, The Next Generation; and The Why and Later, Poets Speak on Rape. She was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but she has lived in Paris, Geneva, Milan, and Osaka, and after escaping from Gulf Coast Mississippi, she currently resides in Sacramento with her three children Avery, Grayson, and Aidan and teaches at Cosumnes River College.
Facebook Post #1
Good morning, starlight. Tea kettle whispers when I leave open her lip. Pour tea into a summer sky colored cup, add cream, sit at the white-washed table, one worn spot where my elbow rests. Out the steamed window I imagine a parade passing by, Mardi Gras style, but silent, rocking ornate tin angels and tissue blossom camellia trees in the cold morning gusts. I wipe my tears, listen to my sleeping boys breath, whisper, “Throw me some prayers, mister.”
Facebook Post #2
Here: a breezy window, pale green dress turning, baby left too long in the drawer. There: doves sail up cliff sides, grandfathers sit in the sun with guitars. And lemon drops. He has the saddest eyes you’ve ever seen: she kisses like a house on fire. She marries the hopes of her dreams. He tattoos a hidden alphabet around her neck in bruises. Someone breaks into shattered starlight and cries out, “Oh.” This world is a Valentine.
