Thursday, July 1, 2010, at 7:00 pm, poets Kristin Bock and Lee Sharkey will read work from their books as well as new poems. ($2-5 sliding scale.)

*Please note our new starting time.

Kristin Bock

Born in 1969, Kristin Bock is the author of Cloisters (Tupelo Press, 2008), which won the 2006 Tupelo Press First Book Award and the da Vinci Eye Award.  She grew up in the small farm town of Woodbury, CT. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from Southern Connecticut State University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she teaches. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and journals, including Columbia, The Seattle Review, Prairie Schooner, The Black Warrior Review, and FENCE. She lives with her husband, artist Geoffrey Kostecki, in Montague, MA, where they refurbish religious murals and sculptural iconography for churches throughout New England. Bock is a contributing editor to the literary magazine Bateau, and a 2006 Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow.

Lee Sharkey

In 1974, Lee Sharkey bought a hundred-year-old Pearl platen press, taught herself to set type and print, and produced over the course of a long Maine winter her first poetry chapbook. Since then, she has continued to work both on and off the grid as a writer and editor. Her poetry books include A Darker, Sweeter String, To A Vanished World, a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust, and farmwife. She is the recipient of the 2010 Maine Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Literary Arts and the 1997 Rainmaker Award in Poetry, judged by Carolyn Forché. Lee co-edits the Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the country’s oldest and most respected poetry journals, and leads a writing workshop for adults with mental illness.

*

WATERCOLOR LEFT IN A HUMID KITCHEN by Kristin Bock

Clearly, she’s ruined.

Her face an overripe peach,
her hand a blowzy peony.

In the rising river, a woman
clutches a white bough, this I can tell.

But is it snowing or flowering?
Is she laughing or drowning?

And is that my hand
dragging her to shore by her hair?

(By permission of Tupelo Press. All rights reserved.)

*

PARABLE OF THE PEACH by Lee Sharkey

The peach was perfect, vulva-clefted, never been refrigerated, fragrant in blush

She had been saving it for breakfast, imagining the burst when she bit in

A company of soldiers, breakfasted on rations, helmeted and shielded, gusseted with canisters and rifle-slung, arrived by dark

Ringing the village. The unassailable perfection of the ring

Sunrise brushed the dust and turned sleep inside out

Their noose of words: Curfew, closed zone

She’d been about to bite

Pots, water tanks clanged outrage from the rooftops

The peach in her hand, hot, soft . . .

Flung through the air at a boy soldier

She, radiant. He, as if his mother had slapped him

(By permission of the poet. All rights reserved.)