Featuring Iain Haley Pollock, author of Spit Back a Boy, Kate Gale, author of The Goldilocks Zone, and Quincy R. Lehr, author of Heimat, hosted by Ernest Hilbert

Open microphone session hosted by Paul Siegell to follow featured readers

Wednesday, September 24th, 2014, 6:30PM
Upstairs at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102, 215-928-8118

FREE!

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Iain Haley Pollock lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Springside Chesnut Hill Academy, where he is the Cyrus H. Nathan ‘30 Distinguished Faculty Chair for English. His first collection of poems, Spit Back a Boy (University of Georgia, 2011), won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Pollock earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Haverford College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University. He is a Cave Canem Fellow.

“If the spirit is generous, and the balance between living and letters match, a fine book of poems sings the author and the reader free.” – Cornelius Eady

“Second Line” by Iain Haley Pollock

I put on a Mingus record, Blues
and Roots, after my grandfather died,
and rummaged through an old wine box

that held family photos. In my favorite,
Granddad is on all fours, playing the pony.
I’ve fallen off his back, into the tall grass

of a Maryland yard, and sit cross-legged
near him. My memories of this, the jazz
swept into them—I began to think what I like

about the best of Mingus: that the players,
confined by music, keep probing,
trying to puncture form and song,

the way a wire hanger in a garbage bag
stretches and tears at the black plastic.
The musicians run their fingers and tongues

along the bars that separate sanity and chaos, meaning
and unmeaning. On that album, Jackie McLean
led the charge. To me, he was mostly ink in liner notes,

the man jazz cats called Jackie Mac. I knew only
that he shared my grandfather’s name, that his sax—
I loved it, threatening to surge beyond the orbit

of Mingus’s bass—and that his playing narrated
my sadness. But Jackie’s alto wasn’t all mourning—
deep in his tone, a joyful second line: in the photo,
Granddad’s face was broad and fixed with laughter.

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Kate Gale is the Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of The Los Angeles Review, and President of the American Composers Forum, Los Angeles. She teaches in Low Residency MFA programs around the country and serves on the boards of A Room of Her Own Foundation and Poetry Society of America. She is the author six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis which premiered in October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee. Her latest poetry collections are The Goldilocks Zone and Echo Light, forthcoming this Fall. She is also the editor of several anthologies and blogs for Huffington Post.

“Welcome to Kate Gale’s world. There are glass houses, a glass orchestra, sex on the roof. . . . Kate Gale knows her Bible and plays whatever music she wants on that musical instrument—but her música is always fresh, and it achieves wisdom.”- Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa

“London Bridge” by Kate Gale

A long precarious thin wire, tiny dancer’s feet.
Shoved her face, in the brutal voice of his father said, “Shut up.”

She moved in light so you couldn’t see her.
Every inch of her he loved, tight stockings, bodice. Silk and ruffles.

She fond her way blindfolded to the other side. Clapping. She all bridge walking.
Afterward with the jug, he’d feel joy, wish he could undo the bad days.

I want to hold you up like wine, see spun light through you.
You’d never fall, my whole love a bridge, not a bruise across your life.

Your hips joy, your mouth wine, your face open like sky.
Pink open, wet across my day.

I savage you, words, knives in my throat.
I want to hold you. I slash like windmills chop the sky.

Hush, she said, we can walk across shadows
to London Bridge, cross the Thames.

Come with me to another country. She’d walk holding his hand,
every time believing she could do it.

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Quincy R. Lehr is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Shadows and Gifts (2013), Heimat (2014), and the forthcoming The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar (2015). He co-founded Modern Metrics Press (now an imprint of EXOT Books) with R. Nemo Hill in 2006, and he has served as the associate editor of The Raintown Review, an up-and-coming print journal, since 2008.

“Left-wing and Lutheran, Lehr brings a healthy Oklahoma skepticism to twenty-first-century life in the big city, be it Dublin or New York. His rhythms are lively,his rhymes, fresh; he’s never a dull read.” – Tim Murphy

Excerpt from the book-length poem Heimat

That jerk Tiresias is now asleep
and snores so loudly that it wakes the neighbors
who shout out curses. “Keep it down, you creep,
or medicate! Do yourself a favor!”
The prophet, though, is out of it and dreaming,
oblivious to us, and to our scheming.

This is not a country for old men,
and thus old men will play by different rules,
babbling about what happened way back when
while tinkering with antiquated tools . . .
unless they sleep, their wisdom overgrown
with tendrils of fatigue. We’re on our own.

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E-Verse Equinox Host Ernest Hilbert is the author of the poetry collections Sixty Sonnets (2009) and All of You on the Good Earth (2013), as well as the spoken word album Elegies & Laments.