112th: Michael Keenan & John Duvernoy
Join us Tuesday, October 21st at 7pm for a reading featuring Michael Keenan, launching his new work, Translations On Waking In An Italian Cemetery, and John Duvernoy, author of Something In The Way // Obstruction Blues.
The poems in Translations On Waking In An Italian Cemetery illuminate that ‘other world, inside this one.’ Wearing line breaks to score your heart beat by, these poems limn the phantasmagoric backstreets till dawn, never settling for the comfort of the nihilist’s pose.
Something In The Way is an aboriginal blues, a gut map, where ecstatic clarity shares a bed with gall stone blindness. Proceeding by feints and jabs, deadpan misdirection undercutting stark confession, the pages share a core vulnerability, a magnetic bruise. These are loner's poems, vying to connect. Sunk deep in the mud of childhood, dragged by an erotic comb with missing teeth, what passes through unexamined, re-emerges in adulthood, wearing masks.
Michael Keenan received his MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. His first chapbook, Two Girls, was published by Say No Press in 2009, and his first book, Translations On Waking In An Italian Cemetery, was released by A-Minor Press in June of 2014. He was nominated for a Puschart Prize in 2011 and was chosen by C.D. Wright to be featured in the PEN Poetry Series. His writing has appeared in Fence, Posit, Chronopolis, Alice Blue Review, Shampoo, NYQ Reviews, Paul Revere’s Horse, Caketrain, A-Minor Magazine, Inter|rupture, Arsenic Lobster, Word For/Word, and Flag + Void, among others, and is forthcoming in Poetry International. Michael currently talks to people at Columbia University and the New School.
John Duvernoy’s first collection of poetry Something In The Way//Obstruction Blues was published by Horse Less Press in 2014. His chapbook Razor Love was put out by Unlock the Clockcase in 2006. John has received fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and the Millay Colony for the Arts. In 2012 he was awarded a Writer’s Grant from the Boomerang Fund for Artists. New work can be found in the upcoming issue of Lana Turner. John lives with his wife in Seattle, Washington.
