free entry / 1pm doors / 1:30 start
This is a Book Release Party for two poetry books coming out with the Boston-based Subpress. The participating poets are Dan Bouchard and Elizabeth Marie Young.
Daniel Bouchard
Daniel Bouchard's previous poetry collections include Spider Drop and Art & Nature (UDP). He works in publishing and lives in Massachusetts.
Farragut in Bryant Park by Daniel Bouchard
The moment becomes funereal,
moving eerily about.
Then things get real. Surfaces
explode in splinters,
about to become surreal,
moving about “as in a dream.”
As the 12 year old kid remembered,
mid-ship, active duty midshipman,
bombarded off Valparaiso
he wrote of it in old age.
He recalled associates later
who chortled at his recollections
of battle: death, ruin, privations
of war among civilians.
He strode out the back room of the grocer
while the cracker barrel crowd
tittered and called him a croaker.
He fled the southern city
and compulsory service
for the Confederacy
not unlike the captain
some generations on
who edelweissed
his way out of the Anschluss
up and over the Alps.
brooklynrail.org/poetry-reading-117-curated-by-dan-bouchard/
Razor Zigzag by Daniel Bouchard
Elizabeth Marie Young
is a Boston-based poet and educator who came of age as a poet in New York City and San Francisco. She spent a decade as a professor of comparative literature and has published widely on gender, sexuality, transgression, and liberation in the poetry of ancient Rome. Her books include the poetry collections An Inventory of Almost Everything (Subpress) and Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, which won the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, as well as a book about the ancient Roman understanding of lyric translation and literary creativity, Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome (U Chicago Press).
The 5 Magic Words by Elizabeth Marie Young
Thank you for writing the software that allows
me to feel fear with such astonishing accuracy.
Thank you for wearing a bell that tinkles whenever
I scratch your chin. Whenever you diddle my dimple
I chuckle, pardon me. Sorry for shifting that pile of
dirt around, I know how you hate dirt. I know you hate
the hairs that grow on my big toe. Sorry about the
pandemic. Thank you for marrying me. Thank you
for Super Nintendo and a quasi-normal childhood.
Thank you for those wisps of fog always sneaking
out of your bonnet. Please stop waving your arms
around while bargaining with the immortals.
Excuse me for offering up your reindeer for ritual
sacrifice. You’re welcome – I took a shower and have
just shaved both my legs. I’ve hired acrobats to reenact
each year of your life in no particular order. I’ve hired
Superman to remove your gall bladder. I’ve hired
various kinds of birds, both real and imagined. Thank
you in advance for all the kindness you’ll show them.
An Inventory of Almost Everything by Elizabeth Marie Young
349-things-i-dont-need-to-worry-about-right-now-the-ollie-impossible