Word frolics in Norfolk

In September I'll be doing an event at the SIBA trade show in Norfolk. And now I've added an open-to-the-public reading with Luisa Igloria. It'll be my first event for the new book--and I think for hers at well. We've planned to get together for years, and now an event is finally happening. We shall read and eat (and frolic and drink chipotle lime margaritas with our feet on Alice-in-Wonderland tuffets! Something like that...)

Double Trouble: 

A Book Launch and Reading Celebration

featuring Luisa Igloria and Marly Youmans

4:00-5:30 p.m.

Saturday, September 20th

Café Stella
1907 Colonial Avenue
Norfolk, Virginia

We both have brand new books--Glimmerglass (novel) and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (poetry collection.) You know that idiom about hints, put a bug in someone's ear? If you have a book-reading friend in Norfolk, please put a go-to-reading bug (about the size of a pencil eraser) in his/her ear...

And here's a prose poem from Luisa's Night Willow, recently out from Elizabeth Adams's Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal. (They also published Thaliad, so we have one publisher in common.) I'm reading Night Willow now.

Night Watch

And if I say heat, expected rain, lassitude--the hollows of my bones begin to mimic the throats of brittle plants. I was seized by thirst, reading a catalogue of inks: morning glory, transparent blue as raindrops on its cheek; moonlight, brazen crimson of azaleas. Purple berries, named after the lady-in-waiting who wrote the first novel. The names of women were not even recorded in her time. I think of her, restless on her sleeping mattress, mining the indigo shade of night after night for illumination. Green sentinels of bamboo; ochre fields, stalks bursting with grain--each pointed like a nib.