Poetry Book Release Reading

Moonpath Press Author
Pamela Hobart Carter

MoonPath Press Author
Michael Magee

Saturday, March 15
4 PM Pacific Time
7 PM Eastern Time


Live on Zoom
[ZOOM Registration LINK]

hosted by
Lana Hechtman Ayers

Pamela Hobart Carter: Earth at Perihelion

“The poems in Pamela Hobart Carter’s Earth at Perihelion hold luminous visions of “our immense home.” Earth itself is a leading character. The deep past—of geology, mythology, and cosmology—returns to the present as music and insight. Creeks mumble in their own language; persons sit among fat marmots. Family intimacies include a mother’s love poem to her daughter and an aunt as entranced with polliwogs as the poet is. A wondrous book, a gift.”
—Priscilla Long, author of Crossing Over: Poems and Holy Magic

LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER

Dear Girl, This color I’m sending you is “cerise”
—saturated, powerful, organic—reminiscent
of you, your concentration; your mission
for meaning, for fulfillment; your sly,
deep hoots and hollers; your contradictions:
intense beyond maternal measure and at a turn,
goofy. Makes me think how your forehead
creases, “cerise,” of the scar that forces
your eyebrow to hop a hairless line. You carry
this mark of boldness, reminding me always
of risk you love, and your fragility. But you mend,
did mend, we mend, and Granny will be better
soon. Saturday, maybe, they’ll let her go home.
You could make her a card, one of your intricate
messages, illuminated laboriously. I marvel
at their cleverness, the fun in them, for us
who study closely—a new little face or joke
tricking around the corner. Cerise: reject
the trappings of this punk hue, allow it to meet
your rods or cones, carry it to your brain, hold it,
see it for its honesty. Sincere cerise. Serious as you.
Bold as you. True as you. Carry it beyond today.
Carry your blaze always. Long after I’m gone.
The bold mixture of you, my love. Grand
punchy cherry color you. Always, Mama

Born in Rhode Island, Pamela Hobart Carter grew up in Montreal and lives in Seattle. She earned two geology degrees (Bryn Mawr College and Indiana University), and became a teacher. Over more than three decades, Carter taught a variety of ages and subjects, from science pedagogy for a teaching program to art for middle school. When classrooms closed for Covid, she added make-a-poem-at-home lessons to her website. These days, she periodically collects poems from preschoolers via their dictation. Carter’s plays have been produced in Seattle, Montreal, and Fort Worth. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net (3x). Some of her other publications include the poetry chapbooks Her Imaginary Museum (Kelsay Books) and Held Together with Tape and Glue (Finishing Line Press); twelve short books in easy-English for adults (written with Arleen Williams, No Talking Dogs Press); and dozens of poems and articles (in literary and teaching journals and in anthologies). Carter is also a visual artist, gym climber, hiker, skier, and mother.

Visit Pamela's page at MoonPathPress.com

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Michael Magee: Shiny Things

Shiny Things is a marvelous compendium, a gallery of impressions and reflections inspired by art experience, travel, the natural world. The poems, some ekphrastic, many synesthetic, are lush, electric, vivid as gemstones. But there is a magical translucence to them: Magee doesn’t only look at, but through the varied subjects and objects of this transparent life. In these chromatic, radiant poems, the poet’s own “glassy eye sees through itself / to the other side of wonderment.”
   —Sati Mookherjee, author of Eye and Ways of Being

MODERN SURREALISM

To go from Sun Yat-Sen
in 1912 to contemporary surrealism
is a culture leap like Jonah’s
out-of-the-body-of-a-whale
experience, the room’s vibrations
of ego, self-identity tenfold
with lots of eyes and vertebrates
watching, splashes and patterns,
mosaics of the Incas stare 
from the wall like jungle gods
and goddesses.
A Carnival of Venice, the mask
and arms incarnation of new life
in Kolosov’s search for self-identity,
Lina’s “Nightbird” with its purple
knots and two hearts in love
like kites at a cocktail party
all shimmering off the wall,
a mixture of lipstick and highballs
greens and olives, lemons,
with oranges of red and Tantric love.

Michael Magee’s plays and poetry have been produced and published in the U.S., England, and Greece. His play Shank’s Mare was produced at Northwest Actor’s Studio and later became a movie which won a best actor award at the Bare Bones, Script to Screen Film Festival in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A Night in Reading Gaol With Oscar Wilde was produced here and in Derby, England. He was co-editor of 2020 Tacoma: In Images and Verse and is editor and publisher of Beaux Arts Press. Recent work has been published in Cirque and Journal of Wild Culture. Michael has lived in Seattle, San Francisco, London, Nottingham, England and now lives in Tacoma, Washington. Michael has read at Shakespeare and Company, Paris and on BBC Radio 1, as well as being a participant in the Jack Straw Writer’s Program for radio in Seattle. He wrote several songs for the CD Vaudeville. He has been an Artist-in-the-Schools in Washington, Seattle Artist-in-Residence with the Seattle Arts Commission and Arts and Aging Team. His three other MoonPath Press collections are Terra Firma: Sacred Ground Poems 1970-2022, How We Move Toward Light, and Cinders of My Better Angels.

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