Katie Ford reads at CSU Long Beach

Thursday, October 25th, 2018

Gjertrud Schneckenberg was scheduled to read tonight, at 7:30, but several weeks ago the Hammer Museum announced that her reading had been cancelled.

For those who had hoped to attend a reading on that evening, and who are willing to drive from West Los Angeles to Long Beach, the poet Katie Ford will be reading at the campus of California State University, Long Beach, at the Anatol Center at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 25th. The Anatol Center is in the AS (“Academic Services”) building between the MacIntosh Building (the nine-story “toaster” building visible from Seventh Street) and the University Library. Parking can be a challenge, so I recommend coming early. The reading itself is free. I believe that my colleague David Hernandez arranged for her visit to CSU Long Beach.

She will also be reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice this coming Sunday, October 28th, at 4:00 p.m., and then reading on November 11 in Seattle with Rae Armantrout. Ford is currently a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and is the director of its MFA program.

Here is a link to a representative selection of her poetry:
https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v8n2/features/ford_k/index.shtml

Her writing has received an unusual number of reviews and citations for its outstanding quality.

“In the short space of two collections, Katie Ford has emerged as one of the most recognizably thoughtful poets of her talented generation.” — David Rigsbee
For Rigsbee’s full-length review, go to:
http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/56/rigsbee_e.php

“Ford’s work is strongly reminiscent of Carolyn Forche’s The Angel of History and deserves the same level of recognition.”—Library Journal

BLURBS FOR KATIE FORD
“Rarely is poetry of such extremity–extremity of experience, extremity of spiritual practice and insight–presented in a style which manages to both horrify, and still break the heart, and, if not soothe, then at least find those reaches in the reader where there is compassion so open it awaits no recompense. Here is a poetry of witnessing–theological, emotional, intellectual–a private end to a century’s horrors, a reminder that not all things begin again, and that from some reaches of experience instruction shines far less than the beauty of the survivor’s report.” ―Jorie Graham

“A distinct and powerful voice in American poetry…. This is a complex, rioting, and heartbreaking book.” — Jane Mead

Jane Mead is the author of four poetry collections, including World of Made and Unmade, and Money Money Money Water Water Water (Alice James Books, 2016 and 2014, respectively). Her honors include fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim Foundations, and a Whiting Award.

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2014_10_020898.php

BLURBS FOR JANE MEAD

“Jane Mead’s our Emily Dickinson, our most ambitious solitary. Her austere poems are brilliant: endlessly inventive, syntactically, tonally and emotionally rich. Alternately ironic and undefended, she never sacrifices compassion, justice, her quest for pleasure. In their longing and their loneliness, tending to the otherness of nature, the beauty of expression, these poems honor the frailty that makes us most human.”—Ira Sadoff

“With each of her books, Jane Mead develops a more economical, unique language for grief, and for the yearning toward wholeness. Confessional detail and philosophical argument are reduced to traces, but their resonance from underneath leaves no doubt that this work is serious. This is a book I will be living with for a long time to come.”—Alan Williamson

“Jane Mead penetrates grief with alacrity and burning self-scrutiny. This work enters the world like wild rain and lightning, an inheritance from Celan’s and Tsvetaeva’s stuttered lyricism. Those who can brave the revolutions in her music will choose life because of its difficulty.”—Jane Miller

Comments are closed.