Tess Gallagher to read at the Hastings Room Reading Series April 18, 2016

TESS GALLAGHER reads

with LARRY MATSUDA

from their collaborative book of poems

Boogie-Woogie Crisscross presented by

Marc Vincenz, editor of MadHat Press and Plume Editions

with the Hastings Room Reading Series

                                       

Monday April 18, 7:00–9:00 pm

The Friends Meeting House

5 Longfellow Park

(opposite the Longfellow House)

Cambridge, MA 02138

Tess Gallagher’s latest book is Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 2011). She recently

companioned the film BIRDMAN, which includes her late husband Raymond Carver’s story: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” She lives and writes in Port Angeles, Washington, her birthplace, as well as intervals spent in her cottage in the west of Ireland, where all of the poems included here were written in

her chair that overlooks a green field in County Sligo.

Lawrence Matsuda was born in the Minidoka, Idaho, World War II Relocation Center, one of the concentration camps where approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were held without due process. Matsuda has a Ph.D. in education and was a visiting professor at Seattle University.

In 2015 he completed two graphic novels with artist Matt Sasaki and interviews with Japanese American

fighters from the 442nd and their relatives, An American Hero: Shiro Kashino, and Fighting for America: Nisei Soldiers.

Boogie-Woogie Crisscross, an intercontinental collaboration/exchange between two poets of international stature is rowdy, rambunctious and heartfelt. With a combination of joyful shared experiences and attention to human suffering, past and present, its authors bring a thoughtful and poetic focus to bear upon global events and their own histories.

These poems developed via e-mails exchanged between Tess Gallagher and Lawrence Matsuda over a number of years. The resulting collaboration is a poetry jam session where they trade and borrow images, and run riffs on each other’s poems in a responsive, competitive, and lighthearted way. Early on, Tess characterizes the style as being “kind of hip and comic book and jangly.” Like any dance it’s also an invitation to lose time and as Larry says—to show your “chops.” A kind of dueling banjos.

It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher’s poems without being drawn into their mesmerizing rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images. —Joyce Carol Oates