What'cha Doin' Tuesday Night?

I'll be here:

Open Books:
Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at 07:30 PM
REBECCA LOUDON & RON STARR

from the OB website:
"We are happy to host two poets with books recently published by Edmonds-based Ravenna Press. Radish King ($13.95) is Rebecca Loudon's deliciously dark and darkly hilarious collection. Things domestic go seriously wrong -- "She's ready to go it alone, more than ready / having tired of and tidied her family, / having sewed her daughter, her son, into waterproof coats." The poems are dreamily menacing, permeated with a sort of courtship of threat and sex. "I want to hurt you in a Rock Hudson Doris Day kind of way." And where else will you find a poem like "Everyone's Favorite Holiday Suicide: A Letter in which Violet Bick Addresses George Bailey for the Last Time," ending (we're sorry to give it away, but we're compelled), "I hope more than anything you just have the courage to jump." She is also the author of the fever-dreamish book Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home, mentioned in our December 2006 newsletter.

Ron Starr's inventive book, A Map by a Dim Lamp ($12.95), flows from the belief held by Oulipo, the French experimental writing group, that form is freeing, and that new forms must constantly be created. Mr. Starr, in "Luther's Narrow Road," replaces some of the words in Basho's classic haiku with those from a Martin Luther essay, resulting in poems such as, "An offense / has settled on a bare Christ -- / autumn evening." Sharp intelligence, humor, close attention to the details of rhythm and sense, and a fascination with religious texts allow his writing to spark on various levels, including the baroque/modern oddness of its structures. Another example: one section of his "Creation Myths of the Latter Urbanites" starts, "In the beginning green grass created happiness and envy. The expressways were without Fords and Volvos, and dusk was upon the fences of the domiciles...." This promises to be a quirky and dynamic evening.