Reading @ Bowery Poetry

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to read at the revamped Bowery Poetry [Club], courtesy of Forrest Gander, who invited me to join him as part of their monthly Sunday Fantasy Reading Series, an event organized by writers Ariel Yelen and Liz Peters. We drew a decent turnout for the Sunday before Labor Day, and our audience, which included some notable writers in their own right, proved to be during the reading and the question and answer session. I publicly read the story "Acrobatique" from Counternarratives for the first time, which sparked a very positive response as well as an excellent question about research and writing.

Forrest Gander (photo © Drew Ciccolo)

Forrest read two selections from his beautiful, disturbing novel The Trace (New Directions, 2014), and concluded with a poem for the Mexican poet Coral Bracho, whose daughter Elena was in the audience. One amazing takeaway from the event was learning that Forrest will be translating the 20 or so poems by Pablo Neruda that his widow and estate discovered not long ago. As he pointed out, though several were unfinished, they were still from Neruda's hand and very well written. I'm looking forward to reading them when they appear. Many thanks to our hosts Ariel and Liz, to Bob Holman, to New Directions, who had books available, and to all who came to the reading! An especial thanks to Forrest again too!

Yours truly (photo © Drew Ciccolo) 

Some of the pre-reading crowd

Forrest before his reading

Forrest and I during the Q&A