Saturday, May 10, 2008

Segue 5/10: Renee Gladman & Rachel Levitsky

The Segue Reading Series presents

Renee Gladman & Rachel Levitsky
Saturday, May 10, 2008
4PM (sharp!)
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson

Renee Gladman is the author of Arlem, Not Right Now, Juice, The Activist, A Picture Feeling, and of a work in-press, Newcomer Can't Swim. Since 2004, she has been the editor and publisher of Leon Works, a perfect bound series of books for experimental prose. She was previously the editor of the Leroy chapbook series, publishing innovative poetry and prose by emerging writers.

from A Picture-Feeling

pre rust the iron
twists were dull
and new just
about to pull apart
just as I was flooded
with picture-feeling
--attached to ideas—
except this one
which was nameless (V
pinned beneath
unbearable weight)
or was
the moment before
the real thing and
V underneath—
the verb not
the subject

Rachel Levitsky's first full length volume, Under the Sun was published by Futurepoem books in 2003. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry and is currently writing a prose novella. She is the founder and co-director of Belladonna*, an event and publication series of feminist avant-garde poetics.

from The Story of My Accident is Ours

"From Almost Any Angle"

We'd woken to the world like characters you'd see in a science fiction movie, the ones without parents, cloned for the purpose of replacing the organs of the rich, or jailed indefinitely or repeatedly for our child-bearing abilities. We had the appearance of arriving whole, the sets of our features predetermined and complete.

We were defined by limitation. We'd been kept away from history by serial clearances: the slums, the streets, the poor, then the rich, then the home, then the street, then the neighborhood, then the mall, and then the mall. The mall.

We recognized each other by the vacant look in our eyes and the sophistication of our speech, when we had the energy to speak. We were not quite like the creatures in Zombie movies that were popular again in our time, we didn't join in the common cause of destroying another or making them more like us, for we didn't have killer instincts, nor did we think that what we were should necessarily be multiplied, though we were confused about the ways we did have, what they were and how they'd come to be. What we knew better than what we were was what we were strange to. We were strange to the ways of smiles possessed by the ones on television1 and outside in front of the church. Or of the two passing each other while one is on the sidewalk and another is driving to deliver a package from a truck. We did not mean to be unfriendly nor dour though I can now see we most certainly appeared so/were so. We ourselves didn't know how else to be; we were mostly all one way.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home