The University of Notre Dame is hosting the festival this year, and on Saturday, 10/6, 10:30AM—Noon, I will be participating on a panel, “(An) Alternate Notion(s) of Home,” with Johannes Görranssen, Mary-Kim Arnold, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Alison Grimaldi Donahue. Details can be found here.

Laura Hinton, Amy King, Susan Lewis, and I will be reading at The Golden Notebook Bookstore in Woodstock, NY,
at 4:30PM.

The first ever Albany Book Festival is happening Saturday, September 29, 2018, 10AM—4PM at the University of Albany, Campus Center, 1400 Washington Ave., Albany. I will have a table there with books to sell, and look forward to seeing many local authors and readers! Here‘s a list of participating local authors and here‘s a list of other participating nationally-recognized authors.

I will be reading from my work on Wednesday, September 26, 6:00pm, in the Henry Hudson Room in Fontaine Hall at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Hosted by Dr. Lea Graham and the Marist English Department, this event is free and open to the public.

“SPOKEN WORD”
Where actors, poets and writers read

Shira Dentz
Susan Lewis

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Catskills
320 Sawkill Road, Kingston, NY
Series Founder and Host: Annie LaBarge

Saturday, September 8, 7:00 pm
$5 suggested donation

Shira Dentz is the author of five full-length books and two chapbooks, most recently, door of thin skins and how do i net thee. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, and Brooklyn Rail, and featured at The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize. She is currently Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky, and teaches creative writing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

Susan Lewis is the author of ten books and chapbooks, including her new collection, Zoom, winner of the Washington Prize. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in numerous journals and anthologies including Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, New American Writing, The New Orleans Review, Raritan, Verse, and Web Conjunctions. She’s the founding editor of Posit, an online journal of literature and art. Her collaborations with composer Jonathan Golove have been recorded and performed at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie’s Weill Hall, and her collaborations with artist Melissa Stern have been exhibited at galleries and museums across the US.

“The way a drop,” a poem from my new book, how do i net thee, on Verse Daily!

Greetings, and happy summer!

We’re delighted to announce the newest issue of Posit, featuring brand-new poetry and prose by Devon Balwit & Jeff Whitney, Laynie Browne, Shira Dentz, Ravitte Kentwortz, Rusty Morrison, Ryan Nowlin, Kwame Opoku-Duku, Jennifer Pilch, Jessica Lee Richardson, Stephanie Strickland, AJ Urquidi, and John Sibley Williams; text + image by Helen Hofling, and visual art by Dozier Bell, Tanya Marcuse, Sam Nhlengethwa, Julie Peppito, and Adams Puryear.

Don’t miss this one — it’s wonderful.

With thanks, as ever, for your interest and support.

Susan Lewis, Bernd Sauermann, Carol Ciavonne, and Melissa Stern

3 Poems at Dispatches, Poetry Wars, June 2018 update:

Friday, June 22 @7PM in The Silo Series at The Word Barn in Exeter, NH

Tuesday, June 26 @6:30PM  at Pete’s Candy Shop in Brooklyn, NY

Thursday, June 28 @6PM at The Book House at Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, NY

by John Keene

I first saw some of Claude Monet‘s (1840-1926) “Waterlilies” paintings on a school trip to the Art Institute of Chicago when I was junior high school. The trip was memorable–and I have written about it, in condensed form, in Annotations–not just because of the visit to the art museum and my encounter with examples of some of the finest European art of the late 19th and early 20th century, but also because of an unexpected moment, when my classmates and I spied a sailor making love to his girlfriend in a nearby window. This was before cellphones or even inexpensive cameras (beyond Polaroids) and video cameras, so it was a scene that, like the water lilies, I and they committed to the sole repository available: memory.

I am not suggesting that I associate Monet’s “Waterlilies” paintings solely with this experience, but there is a sensuousness, a tinge of eros, in Monet’s great Impressionist series of flowers and water and light and space, the colors and brushstrokes vibrant and shifting, the Giverney landscapes so alive that the paintings themselves seem to come to life, casting a spell over the viewer.  Over the years I have been discussing and occasionally writing about visual art, I have encountered opposition about particular artists I love (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Lois Maillou Jones, Adrian M. S. Piper, etc.) and art works, like Marcel Duchamp‘s “Fountain” or Francis Bacon‘s portraits, but I have never heard a negative word about Monet’s water lilies. (I have read some critiques, of course.)

Today’s poems, then, summon Monet’s late masterpieces. The first poem is by Shira Dentz, a poet I have known since my 20s; my friend the fine poet Amy Lemmon introduced us. Shira is a gifted poet as well and the author of four books, including Door of Thin Skins (2012), my favorite and a formal hybrid that manages to surprise and delight from start to finish. Her “Monet” poem appears in her 2010 collection, Black Seeds on a White Dish, whose title, as the poem below make clear, is drawn from this poem.

continue reading here