I went to hear new friend Jennifer Kwon Dobbs read at the KGB Bar last night. The night was a celebration of new books by Jennifer, Tina Chang, and Tom Fink.
Tom read first and invited his daughter up with him to read a series of 11 line poems. He then read primarily from his new book Clarity (Marsh Hawk Press 2008) and a couple from After Taxes (Marsh Hawk Press 2004). He’s quite the performer with great moments of humor, singing some of the poems to some rather well-known tunes, and switching in and out of accents for the different speakers.
Tina was second and told an inspiring story over the genesis of the
anthology she co-edited,Language for a New Century (Norton 2008), and the perserverance over the years as she watched it get rejected from every publisher and agent. The work very much follows in the lineage of and deepens the ground Carolyn Forche broke with herAgainst Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness anthology. Forche in fact wrote the foreward to the book and Tina admitted that was very much her vision, to compile a testament from “the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond” that addressed the skewed notion of “the East” in the post-9-11 world. It’s a beautiful book (check out the cover) with compelling subsections: “Slips and Atmospherics” is my favorite so far.
When it was time for Jennifer to read she plugged my book Pear Slip and in an impromptu moment invited me up to read a poem, so I gave a cameo performance of “How to Write, How Not to Write, About Pears” which seemed to go over well (thank you again Jennifer!). She then read from her beautiful Paper Pavilion(WhitePine Press 2007) and read some new poems, one entitled “Orphan” which came fully formed the night before last with tape gun in hand while she was packing up boxes, and many from her new chapbook on which she’s working which included a long powerful poem called “The Angel” that she’s been working on for the past three years.
Pick up these amazing books everyone!