Lives Brought to Life
Care to cool off by the pool, in front of the fan, or in an air conditioned library? Consider seeing everything the authors of CavanKerry Press have been doing despite the summer heat.
Cati Porter- The Body at a Loss
January Gill O’Neil joins Patrick Donnelly for an afternoon of fine poetry!
The Brookline Poetry Series meets once a month on Sunday afternoons, September through May, normally in Hunneman Hall at the Brookline Village Library (361 Washington St., Brookline, MA 02445).
Timing of performances:
St. John’s Church in Ashfield is pleased to announce that January Gill O’Neil will be the featured reader for the Ninth Annual Ann Hutt Browning Poetry series. The reading will be held on Saturday, May 11, at 4 p.m. at St. John’s Church, Ashfield. In addition, the Ann Hutt Browning Youth Poetry Contest winners will read their prize-winning poems at that time.
January Gill O’Neil is the author of Rewilding (fall 2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), published by CavanKerry Press. Her poem “Hoodie” recently appeared in the New York Times Magazine. She is an assistant professor of English at Salem State University, and from 2012-2018, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. A Cave Canem fellow, January’s poems and articles also appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares and Ecotone, among others. In 2018, January was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and was named the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence for 2019-2020 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts.
Sarah Browning, Ann’s daughter and founding director of the Split This Rock Poetry Project in Washington, D.C., whose recent collection of poetry is titled Killing Summer, will also speak at the reading. Judges for the Youth Contest include poets Susie Patlove, Marie Gauthier, and former Browning winner, Henry Lombino, a former Browning contest winner.
The event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for signing, courtesy of Boswell’s Books in Shelburne Falls. Refreshments will be served. This program is supported in part by grants from the Ashfield, Buckland, Charlemont/Hawley, Deerfield, and Plainfield local cultural councils, local agencies which are supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
Rebecca Morgan Frank (Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country), January Gill O’Neil (Rewilding), and Leona Sevick (Lion Brothers) read from their new collections of poetry. Book sales and signing will follow. FREE to attend and open to the public.
“So much happens in these intensely lyrical poems, accompanied by such subtle music and profound, often witty, meditations on love, loneliness, rapture, and mortality. [Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country] is a beautiful book, one that asks us to see the everyday world anew, and discover in it marvelous strangeness.”—Kevin Prufer, author of How He Loved Them
“Rewilding, a relatively new ecological term, means to return an area of land to its original state. Reveling in letting go of the damaged and broken parts of ourselves while celebrating renewal and new beginnings, O’Neil’s poetry examines the external worlds of race and culture and the internal, personal worlds of family and desire. Ultimately, these poems tap into what is wild and good in all of us.”
“Leona Sevick’s Lion Brothers is a psychologically astute, keen, and powerful sequence of poems that harness the luminous particulars of experience and race to reveal worlds within and behind the immediate, visible one.”—Arthur Sze, author of Compass Rose
Join Catherine Barnett and CavanKerry poet January Gill O’Neil for an hour of fine poetry!
Founded in 1973, the award-winning Blacksmith House Poetry Series brings established and emerging writers of poetry and fiction to Harvard Square. The series is sponsored by Cambridge Center for Adult Education and holds readings at the Blacksmith House, site of the village smithy and spreading chestnut tree of Longfellow’s 1839 poem “The Village Blacksmith.”
THE CATHEDRAL
—After Rodin’s The Cathedral
I watch my daughter imitate
the pose of Rodin’s Cathedral.
Her arms curved in slow gyration.
It is her way of understating
the dark bronze, how two arms
can captivate the imagination
in their dizzying swirl,
find balance between
light and shadows. In truth,
the hands are both right hands
turning in on themselves, an architecture
almost sacred, serpentine, yet protective
of the space within, of what the
bronze cannot hold. My daughter bends
uncomfortably away from me, resistant, as if
her whole body is questioning
what it means to be a girl.
She sees—maybe
for the first time—what is there
and what is not from the hollow
her hands make, all the empty angles
that never touch,
the almost-grasp of the intimate.
Her wrists slight and glistening
with summer’s patina,
her fingertips conjure her being
and becoming,
body and soul
closing and opening
at the same time.
A few years ago, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem hosted an expansive exhibit of sculptor Auguste Rodin. My daughter and I fell in love with his sculpture, The Cathedral. We were enthralled. And while she moved on, there was something intimate about two hands almost-grasping. It seemed to be the perfect metaphor for us as she enters her teenage years and we enter a new phase of our relationship.
SAVE 20% on REWILDING now through October 26th!
SUNDAY
You are the start of the week
or the end of it, and according
to The Beatles you creep in
like a nun. You’re the second
full day the kids have been
away with their father, the second
full day of an empty house.
Sunday, I’ve missed you. I’ve been
sitting in the backyard with a glass
of Pinot waiting for your arrival.
Did you know the first sweet 100s
are turning red in the garden,
but the lettuce has grown
too bitter to eat. I am looking
up at the bluest sky I have ever seen,
cerulean blue, a heaven sky
no one would believe I was under.
You are my witness. No day
is promised. You are absolution.
You are my unwritten to-do list,
my dishes in the sink, my brownie
breakfast, my braless day.
Sunday
Sometimes life doesn’t work out the way you planned, so it’s important to stop and breathe. No day is promised. We must appreciate the small moments—even when the kids are away, even when I am alone. It is in my moments of melancholy that I find gratitude.
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HOODIE
Rewilding
A gray hoodie will not protect my son
from rain, from the New England cold.
I see the partial eclipse of his face
as his head sinks into the half-dark
and shades his eyes. Even in our
quiet suburb with its unlocked doors,
I fear for his safety—the darkest child
on our street in the empire of blocks.
Sometimes I don’t know who he is anymore
traveling the back roads between boy and man.
He strides a deep stride, pounds a basketball
into wet pavement. Will he take his shot
or is he waiting for the open-mouthed
orange rim to take a chance on him? I sing
his name to the night, ask for safe passage
from this borrowed body into the next
and wonder who could mistake him
for anything but good.
Hoodie
When I wrote this poem, I was thinking of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin. My son is at the age where he must be responsible for his own safety. We’ve had “the talk” quite a bit. The world is changing rapidly. Our preconceived notions of civility are being challenged daily. This poem is mother’s wish for “safe passage” as her son moves between worlds.
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