LINK to Recording of W – E Poets Reading on March 14

Monday, March 15th

Yesterday, Sunday, March 14th, marked the annual shift of an hour forward on the clocks as a way of imposing “longer” days” on people. It certainly didn’t make waking up this morning any easier, since I felt as if was behind schedule the second that I roused myself from bed.

Yesterday’s reading was exceptionally lively, though the unusually low attendance made us wonder if holding a reading on the day that daylight savings shifts is one of those days that one should avoid in scheduling public events (along with Thanksgiving and Mother’s Day).

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the link to the reading:

featuring

SANDY YANNONE — GRACE BAUER — ERIN MURPHY — CAROL ELLIS

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Bill Mohr’s revised, slightly expanded revision of his introduction to Carol Ellis, on March 14th:

I first read some of Carol Ellis’s poems back in the early 1990s, when she was living in Southern California at the first of several academic appointments. The brushstrokes of her imagery immediately impressed me back then with their luminous subtlety of detail and I kept track of her writing as she moved further north in California and then on to Portland, Oregon, and I moved first to San Diego, then Long Island, New York, and finally to Long Beach, California. Among my projects since starting work at CSULB, my blog has been the thing that surprised me the most. I never thought it would keep going for more than five years. It turns out, however, that one of the advantages of sustaining a blog is that one’s reviews stay public long after being posted, and I like to imagine that my review of Carol Ellis’s collection from Finishing Line Press, I Want a Job (2014), helped encourage the readers at Beyond Baroque to take notice of the manuscript that won its 2019 poetry book prize.

In reading LOST AND LOCAL the other night, I realized once again the inadequacy of my blurb on the back cover, but how can one sum up even in a single paragraph – let along a single sentence — work that is as intimate as it is shy? I recollect that the original full-length version of my blurb spoke of how the graceful rhythms of her prose poems in particular quietly transform the quotidian with their slow-motion syntax. One finds oneself within her poems as if at the center of a somersault that is not aware of its illuminating trajectory and the radiance that lights up what appears to be beyond its circumference. No matter how often one of her prose poems turns within our consciousness, we only gain a surer footing in the permeating orientations of its metaphors. I have yet to write a full-length review of Lost and Local for my blog, and it is my expectation that I will soon do so with her voice reading poems today that linger in the ear of my mind. I present to you, the poet Carol Ellis.

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GRACE BAUER’s latest collection is Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). Previous books include: Mean/Time, The Women at the Well, Nowhere All At Once, Retreats & Recognitions, and Beholding Eye. She is also co-editor of the anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. She is the Aaron Douglas Professor Emerita at the University of Nebraska, and facilitates workshops and manuscript consultations through Larksong Writers’ Group.

To buy Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems, please visit:

https://bookshop.org/books/unholy-heart-new-and-selected-poems/9781496225948

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CAROL ELLIS was born in Detroit, Michigan and lives in Portland, Oregon. She’s been around the academic block with her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. In addition to two chapbooks: Hello (Two Plum Press, 2018), and I Want A Job (Finishing Line Press, 2014), a full-length collection Lost and Local won the 2019 Beyond Baroque’s Pacific Coast Poetry Series award. Her poems and essays are or will be published in anthologies and journals including ZYZZYVA, Comstock Review, The Cincinnati Review, Saranac Review, and Cider Press Review. In 2015 she spent time in Cuba writing a book and giving readings.

To buy Lost and Local, visit:

https://www.spdbooks.org/AdvancedSearch/DefaultWFilter.aspx?SearchTerm=lost+and+local

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ERIN MURPHY is the author or editor of eleven books, including Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry) and Assisted Living (Brick Road Poetry Prize, 2018), a collection of demi-sonnets, a form she devised. Her most recent co-edited anthology, Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), won the Foreword INDIES Gold Medal Book of the Year Award. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Foley Poetry Award, the National Writers’ Union Poetry Award judged by Donald Hall, a Best of the Net award judged by Patricia Smith, and The Normal School Poetry Prize judged by Nick Flynn. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona. www.erin-murphy.com

To buy Assisted Living, visit:

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SANDRA YANNONE grew up in Old Saybrook, CT, where she daily viewed Long Island Sound from the end of her street. She published her debut collection, Boats for Women, in part about the Titanic disaster of 1912, with Salmon Poetry in 2019; Salmon will publish The Glass Studio in 2022. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in numerous print and online journals including Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, Women’s Review of Books, Impossible Archetype, and Lambda Literary Review. She also has written essays on the intersections between poetry and social justice for Olympia, WA’s Works in Progress. She hosts Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry on Facebook via Zoom on Sundays. Visit her at www.sandrayannone.com

To buy Boats for Women, visit:

https://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=488&a=331

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