Tim Kelly gave a great reading at Open Books. I just love his meticulous, original, layered descriptions of the body. Truly amazing.

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I read tonight with Rick Barot at Village Books in Bellingham. If you are in town: come on down!

RICK BAROT & PETER PEREIRA, POETRY (from the website)

Time: Friday, April 25, 2008 7:00 p.m.
Location: Village Books

In the five years since his first, prize-winning collection The Darker Fall, Rick Barot’s work has both deepened and expanded. His remarkable second book, Want, is concerned with the way seeing creates desire, and desire creates the world, and somehow, destroys it too. Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first book, The Darker Fall, was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and was published by Sarabande Books in 2002. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including The New Republic, Poetry, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, and Legitimate Dangers. In 2001 he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches both in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at Pacific Lutheran University.

"Rick Barot’s exquisite and subtle sensibility, like Keats’s, is led in equal measure by a tough intellect and an open heart. He follows his own prescription to “Tell each story cold,” and with a magician’s verve and aplomb, he makes language perform its most convincing tricks by pulling the handkerchief from what is otherwise “an empty fist,” by finding the “white nouns of the moon.” Barot’s Want is dexterous and thrilling, and his capacious and generous vision shows us how the eye survives "to correct the heart." —Michael Collier

Peter Pereira’s newest collection, What's Written on the Body, explores love, humor, word play, religion, and domestic gay life, often drawing from his experience as a community clinic doctor in Seattle. These wide-ranging poems examine the ways experience is imprinted on the body—in beauty marks, blemishes, tattoos, scars, tics, tremors, and memories. His poems have been featured on National Public Radio's The Writer's Almanac, and appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday. His other books include: The Lost Twin and Saying the World, Winner of the Hayden Carruth Award. He is a family physician in Seattle, and was a founding editor of Floating Bridge Press.

“Peter Pereira knows like no other American poet except perhaps Williams how the body may break but the soul soldiers on. His poems are made of the stuff we’re made of: gristle and bone, song and silence, doubt and love. They issue forth from the depths of a powerful heartfelt humanity that widens to include us, indeed to require us to belong.” —Nance Van Winckel
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from Word a Day:

spall (spal) verb tr., intr.

To break into small pieces; to splinter.

noun

A chip or splinter, especially of stone.

[Of unknown origin.]