Pattie McCarthy, Eleni Sikelianos, and Teresa Carmody, October 19, 2013
On Saturday, October 19 at 7:00 p.m. writers Pattie McCarthy, Eleni Sikelianos, and Teresa Carmody read from their work at Counterpath.
“Pattie McCarthy’s MARYBONES powerfully evokes—and invokes—the iconic, implacable mother-of-god Everywoman who is always slippping out of canonical reach. The rosary was once a handful of bones; it used to be flowers. In this gorgeous enunciation of annunciations, Mary touches the singular with the universal, an open signifier of unwritten and unmarried mothers. She is the S. S. Mary, the Santa Maria, a casualty of unknown forces, an early American, a boat full of immigrants, a survivor of hard labor. McCarthy lovingly draws all of her into the refuge of this amazing book.”—Elizabeth Willis on McCarthy’s Marybones
“Sikelianos’s gift has always been for place and the particular. In her extraordinary new collection she conjures a sympathetic magic for the quick and the dead. This mid-territory where language and disappearance are forever turning and returning is explored and surveyed in loving detail. These poems offer consolation for our American predicament here and now where ‘the body picks up its shadow like a baby and carries it home.'”—Susan Howe on Sikelianos’s The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead
“Like the difficult and necessary theological propositions embedded within the works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, Requiem suggests that perhaps, in the end, all we can do is see until we can’t anymore. Carmody’s darkly poignant illustration of this advocates that seeing—despite our fears, limitations, and distractions—may be one of love’s most sincere gestures.” — American Book Review on Carmody’s Requiem
Pattie McCarthy is the author of Marybones, bk of (h)rs, Verso and Table Alphabetical of Hard Words. Her work had appeared recently in many journals, including Colorado Review, Dusie, EOAGH, Fanzine, ixnay reader, Lungfull!, The Poetry Project Newsletter and The Tangent. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University. (Video above.)
Eleni Sikelianos , a California native, longtime New Yorker, and world traveler, lives in Boulder and teaches at Denver University. Among her publications are The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead (2013), Body Clock (2008), and The California Poem (2004), all from Coffee House Press.
Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem (Les Figues, 2005). She is also the author of I Can Feel (Insert Press, 2012), Eye Hole Adore (PS Books, 2008), and the chapbook Your Spiritual Suit of Armor by Katherine Anne (Woodland Editions, 2009). She is a co-founding editor of Les Figues Press, and the co-editor of its recent anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women (2012).