GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington
Thursday, May 9
7pm
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd.,
Suite 104B
(St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA
printedmattervancouver.com
christopherjluna@gmail.com
LGBTQ-friendly, all ages,
and uncensored since 2004
Featuring Ralph Salisbury and Ingrid Wendt:
Ralph Salisbury’s three books of fiction and 11 books of poems evoke his Cherokee-Shawnee-Irish-English-American heritage and his life as a questing human in a violent world. His eleventh book of poems, Like Sun in Storm ($12), is just out from Portland’s The Habit of Rainy Nights Press. Recipient of numerous awards, including a Rockefeller/Bellagio fellowship, Salisbury’s book-length memoir, So Far So Good ($20, winner of the 2012 Riverteeth Literary Nonfiction Award), has also just appeared from The University of Nebraska Press. Light Through a Bullet Hole: Poems New and Selected ($20) will also be available at the reading. A Professor Emeritus of the University of Oregon, and former editor-in-chief of Northwest Review, Salisbury and his wife, Ingrid Wendt, live in Eugene.
Ingrid Wendt’s books of poems have won the Oregon Book Award (for Singing the Mozart Requiem), the Editions Prize (for Surgeonfish, $17), and the Yellowglen Award (for The Angle of Sharpest Ascending, $16). Her first book, Moving the House, was chosen for BOA Editions by William Stafford, who also wrote the introduction. A longtime resident of Eugene, she has co-edited From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry and In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts. Her newest book of poems, Evensong ($16), a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Award, offers a host of small epiphanies arising from everyday life: turning points in relationships, insights into our troubled world, and coming to terms with loss.
My Brother’s Poem: Vietnamese War, 1969
You tell me you can not write it
yesterday’s pretty village splinters and in
your aircraft cargo compartment ammunition/rations/med-
icines gone an American lies wrapped in his raincoat
strapped to the floor of that machine generations struggled
to invent and thousands of hours of lives went to create
the boy’s belongings all he could bear
on his back packaged beside him
sunset a shimmer like cathedral glass
a memory the instrument-panel glow
as low as devotional candles showing
in plexiglass monsoon screams past your face
above the controls your own American face
Ralph Salisbury
from Like the Sun in Storm
After a Strong Wind
Other sounds return slowly, the way the first stars
blink on unannounced. Horses snuffling weeds in the meadow.
Warbler patching the thicket with song. Like thoughts
catching up to you. Things you have known all along.
Ingrid Wendt, from Singing the Mozart Requiem
PRINTED MATTER VANCOUVER 