August 6, 2015

David Need, Joseph Donahue, & Ally Harris


Thursday, August 6
7:00 pm

503-236-2665

David Need's two new books are Roses (translations of late French poems by Rilke, from Horse & Buggy Press) and Offshore St. Mark (a chapbook of poems, from Three Count Pour). He teaches in the Departments of Religion and Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University, and his poetry and essays on poetry have appeared in Hambone, Talisman, Golden Handcuffs Review, Spoke, and Oyster Boy. Since 2009, he has curated an occasional long-poem reading series, "Arcade Taberna."

Joseph Donahue's most recent books of poetry are Red Flash on a Black Field (Black Square Editions) and the forthcoming volumes, Dark Church, the third volume of an ongoing poem, Terra Lucida (Verge Editions), and Wind Maps, a book length sequence (Talisman). He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University.

Ally Harris is the author of two chapbooks, Her Twin Was After Me (Slim Princess Holdings, 2014) and Floor Baby (dancing girl press, 2011). She is the poetry editor of Heavy Feather Review and submission, a new reading series in Portland curated by blind online submission.


VIII

Too full of your dream,
flower with so many within,
damp as one who weeps,
you lean towards the dawn.
Your sweet powers, that sleep
in an unsettled longing,
unfold these tender forms
between cheeks and breasts.

Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by David Need


WIND MAP

                 minor lives

Every Shabbat, the Mesopotamians; how they died out, how their myths run riot, on TV, in the movies, in national life, how all violence and disorder is from them. Before they left the world they fucked it over for good, he says, as much as says, in his intellectual way, as he is very smart, our rabbi, for the theological seminary in Cincinnati he turned down Harvard. The opening lines of Genesis failed to defeat them. Now their Creation story rules us, he says. Now, we are slaves of gods who made us by murdering a horrible demon, wringing her blood into the ground, then sculpting us from that mud.

Joseph Donahue


Adjust Toward the Memory Glass Where Much Has Been Painted Out 
by a Predeliction for Now

Well, well. A haunting paranoia
half-cocked/one hand
in the blackberry: when, then
do we move to completion? A gauzy ringing
in the serpentarium
dressed with grenadine
I sat you down
in the lazulite, limber organ
of the glade & sang
to you among the ashen birds
of paradise
but there was no record of the sound.

Ally Harris