Saturday, January 11, 8:00 p.m.
Martin Corless-Smith and Catherine Wagner
@ Ruthless Grip
We hope you can join us on Saturday, January 11 at 7:30 p.m. for the first reading of the spring season in the Ruthless Grip Poetry Series at Washington Printmakers Gallery (1732 Connecticut Ave. NW, second floor, several blocks north of the Dupont Circle Q Street Metro Exit), featuring MARTIN CORLESS-SMITH and CATHERINE WAGNER.
MARTIN CORLESS-SMITH's new book _Nota_ , which includes the apocryphal works of the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Swan, will come out this spring. He's from Worcestershire, England, and lives in Boise, Idaho.
Here's what some folks have to say about Martin Corless-Smith's previous books _Of Piscator_ (U Georgia, 1997) and _Complete Travels_ (West House Books, 2000):
Jacket Magazine: "Original...His...evocation of older poetries transcends expectations about what we are obliged to term linguistically innovative poetry."
Harriet Zinnes, Chelsea Magazine: "It's as if the poet managed the almost impossible: to make contemporary techniques combine with the traditional in such a way that he turns on his head both the old and the new. . . A most uncanny, original postmodern poet, singing the contradiction and disorders of the millennium."
CATHERINE WAGNER's first book _Miss America_ appeared in 2001 from Fence Books and is currently an SPD bestseller. She was born in Burma, grew up in Baltimore, and now lives in Boise, Idaho.
Here's what people are saying about _Miss America_:
"Jack Spicer's Martians are back, but now they're talking wild girl-talk. In Catherine Wagner's Miss America, public and private collide in a new way, like matter and anti-matter. This is a conflagration. "That is damage talk," she says, "Want to watch me/Make it". And I do. In fact, if I died, I might want to come back as Catherine Wagner." --Rae Armantrout
"Wagner bypasses familiar, clumsy analogies to capture deeper intricacies. I want to say something like 'she underscores the linked nature of social margins, and implies a possible outside that has nothing to do with namable categories,' which is true, but it falls short of what she's really doing, which can't be paraphrased. She ties things together in ways that haven't yet become conversational fodder. Her angle is slightly but importantly new, and therefore unsayable in any words other than hers."-Boston Review
We hope you can join us for the reading and all festivities afterwards.
MARTIN CORLESS-SMITH's new book _Nota_ , which includes the apocryphal works of the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Swan, will come out this spring. He's from Worcestershire, England, and lives in Boise, Idaho.
Here's what some folks have to say about Martin Corless-Smith's previous books _Of Piscator_ (U Georgia, 1997) and _Complete Travels_ (West House Books, 2000):
Jacket Magazine: "Original...His...evocation of older poetries transcends expectations about what we are obliged to term linguistically innovative poetry."
Harriet Zinnes, Chelsea Magazine: "It's as if the poet managed the almost impossible: to make contemporary techniques combine with the traditional in such a way that he turns on his head both the old and the new. . . A most uncanny, original postmodern poet, singing the contradiction and disorders of the millennium."
CATHERINE WAGNER's first book _Miss America_ appeared in 2001 from Fence Books and is currently an SPD bestseller. She was born in Burma, grew up in Baltimore, and now lives in Boise, Idaho.
Here's what people are saying about _Miss America_:
"Jack Spicer's Martians are back, but now they're talking wild girl-talk. In Catherine Wagner's Miss America, public and private collide in a new way, like matter and anti-matter. This is a conflagration. "That is damage talk," she says, "Want to watch me/Make it". And I do. In fact, if I died, I might want to come back as Catherine Wagner." --Rae Armantrout
"Wagner bypasses familiar, clumsy analogies to capture deeper intricacies. I want to say something like 'she underscores the linked nature of social margins, and implies a possible outside that has nothing to do with namable categories,' which is true, but it falls short of what she's really doing, which can't be paraphrased. She ties things together in ways that haven't yet become conversational fodder. Her angle is slightly but importantly new, and therefore unsayable in any words other than hers."-Boston Review
We hope you can join us for the reading and all festivities afterwards.