We'll close out April, and Poetry Month, with a virtual visit from poets Katherine Gekker, Katherine E. Young and Courtney LeBlanc.
Join us on Facebook for this live event, April 29th at 7pm!
Katherine Gekker will be sharing her debut collection, IN SEARCH OF WARM BREATHING THINGS.
"Is anything common?" Katherine Gekker asks in her debut collection, IN SEARCH OF WARM BREATHING THINGS. The answer, in these richly detailed poems, is no. Gekker is a keen observer, able to "unlock the beauty hidden" in the ordinary. An iridescent grackle becomes a symbol of hope, "collarbones shimmer like wings." Weaving images of the natural world with glimpses of a struggling marriage, Gekker portrays life in all its emotional complexity. "Two bees are fighting or courting-- I can't tell which," she writes in "To Cast a Shadow Again." Yet there are moments of joy, the promise of transformation. "My shift billows, diaphanous.... I can seduce anyone tonight beneath fronds slicing like blades." Katherine Gekker was born in Washington, DC. She founded a commercial printing company in 1974 and sold it 31 years later. When not writing, she practices piano.
Courtney LeBlanc will read from her new collection, BEAUTIFUL & FULL OF MONSTERS.
Love isn’t always pretty, yet most of us choose to remain constant in its pursuit. These poems unwrap the mythos of romance with the clairvoyance of a writer who knows the best and worst of relationships inside and out. LeBlanc dares to honestly show us how even when the best of intentions fail, we can always find beauty if we stay true to the monsters in ourselves. Courtney LeBlanc is a Word Perv, poet, feminist, runner and wine-lover, who lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Katherine E. Young will read from DAY OF THE BORDER GUARDS.
DAY OF THE BORDER GUARDS, the debut collection from Katherine E. Young, is set entirely in Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. The ghosts of Russian writers Pushkin, Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva, and many others wander through these poems, making tea, fighting with their relatives, cursing faithless lovers. Bulgakov’s heroine Margarita describes meeting the Master; Lermontov’s grandmother worries that the young poet is wasting his life. Lady Macbeth is alive and well and living in post-Soviet Georgia. Enemies stalk the margins: hostile warlords, informants, the secret police. A man falls through the ice into a ruptured hot-water pipe, nuclear reactors melt down, an airplane lands on Red Square. Perestroika arrives and departs, like other fashions. A marriage falters. The phone rings in the middle of the night in a Siberian hotel. The corpse of a gypsy king boards a plane for Moscow. Young, who also translates Russian poetry and prose, has lived and worked in Russia and the Soviet Union off and on since 1981: not surprisingly, then, these poems—originally published in The Carolina Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among others—willfully skip across borders of language, culture, and literary tradition, exploring Russian and North American poetic traditions and celebrating both.
