TWO AWP PROPOSALS ACCEPTED FOR PORTLAND 2019!!!!

Spectacular news! Two AWP proposals I am participating in have been accepted for the 2019 Portland Conference! So thrilled to be moderating "Hybrid Sex Writing: What's Your Position?" with panelists Cecilia Tan, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Jonathan Penton, and extra-amazing special guest Erica Jong!!!!! I am also event organizer and panelist for "The Critical Creative: The Editor-Poet" with our brilliant moderator Marc Vincenz and wonderful panelists Amy King, Kwame Dawes, and Michael Anania! What incredible colleagues and what great panels! Looking forward to a brilliant literary spring in 2019!

My Review of BORDER CROSSINGS by Thaddeus Rutkowski

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2018/06/01/border-crossings-by-thaddeus-rutkowski/

BOUNDARY ISSUES: Thaddeus Rutkowski’s Border Crossings

by Larissa Shmailo

Border Crossings

Sensitive Skin Books

ISBN  978-1977850898

Copyright 2018

96 pp.

Like a Chinese-Polish American cross between Rod Serling and Emily Dickinson, Thaddeus Rutkowski invites you to the portals of mind and matter in Border Crossings. In this first collection of poems, the fiction writer and performance artist presents carefully sculpted, deceptively simple verses of immediate interest to the reader, typically with an understated but potent twist.

Whether at the boundaries between cultures, the edges of human interiority, or the trespasses of racism, trapdoors usually closed shut are pried open in Border Crossings. “Light and Shadow,” among the poems opening the book, describes the poet’s initial conflict moving in and out of hidden places:

My father opens a trapdoor
and leads me down concrete stairs
. . .

I don’t want to stay.
Spiders scrunch in the corners,
and pieces of copper tubing—
. . .
litter the floor.

. . .

Spiders notwithstanding, the poet finds himself liking the smell of horsehair cement in the cellar and wanting to stay there. The rest of the volume’s poems proceed to traverse borders to the secret and unknown.

As Rutkowski comes to love cellars, so he comes to love spiders. The collection reveals the rurally reared poet’s childlike fascination with spiders, bees, flies, rodents, raptors, tree frogs, and other animalia of crevices and corners. There is both a love for the honest presence of nature’s smallest and a vampire’s interest in “little lives”:

I can see and hear it now,
the crazy path of flight at blinding speed,
the inevitable, the unavoidable, hitting,
when the crazy fly comes into contact
with the eye, with the bed,
buzzing around upside down,
for the crazy fly has no great sense of equilibrium.
                                     

And:

. . .

I stand back
while a hyper bird perches on a jumbo stalk
so another can feed on the multi seeds
next to the mad mud hole.

Perhaps these innocent animals offer a kind of escape from other, more malevolent creatures. From “Party Animals”:

I throw a party

 . . .

Another guest says

he killed people

who looked like me

when he was in Vietnam.

The kindness of nature juxtaposes vividly with the descriptions of rednecks and racists literally at the poet’s door; the conjunction is reminiscent of Viktor Frankl seeing hope and life in a sparrow perched outside his Auschwitz barracks window. The violent racists cross borders in threatening trespass and are held back spiritually by the poet’s integrity and wit, with the help of small loving lives.

As a veteran performance poet and ranter, Rutkowski routinely crosses audience boundaries with épater-le-bourgeoisie material. A common edgy theme is sex, delivered with deadpan. From “Nine Rules for No Sex”:

No kissing with a cold sore.
No kissing with a sore throat.
No thoughtless pressing, rubbing or brushing.

No fingering with long nails.
No fingering with hangnails.
No foolish fingering . . . .

The motion is sometimes toward stand-up comedy, as in “Anarchist Manifesto” ( “I believe in anarchy, / but not if everybody goes wild.”) The same wry humor obtains as the poet finds his Asian roots in food and found poems; “Found Poem, Hong Kong Museum”:

When you are finished tilling the soil,
spading seedlings, weeding, winnowing,

hulling, grinding and pounding,

you may enjoy
the silky yellow rice,
the dry sticky rice,
the rat’s tooth rice,
the little flowery waist rice,
and the yellow husk full brow rice.

 
The poet encourages forays into the unknown, but with realism and caveats. Despite the “disappointing” toilet facilities of foreign places, and the shock of strange invertebrate foods, Rutkowski reminds us in the poem, “Border Crossing,” that “it’s the people we want to see.” And cautions his reader:

So let’s think twice before we cross
the twenty yards of no-man’s-land.
I know you want to get there
as fast as we can.

Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic.

Patient Women Launch Party 9/8 Featured in the Village Voice!

Delighted that our upcoming launch for Patient Women is featured in the Village Voice! You are all coming, right?
VILLAGE VOICE COVERAGE OF LARISSA'S LAUNCH PARTY

Save the date! The NYC Patient Women launch party 9/8

Friends, save the date! The NYC launch party will happen Tuesday, Sept. 8 at 7:00 pm at Uncle Vanya's, 315 W 54. Readings by Alexander Cigale, Steve Dalachinsky, Bonny Finberg, Patricia Spears Jones, Ron Kolm, Irina Mashinski, Yuko Otomo, Audrey Roth, Thaddeus Rutkowski, yours truly, and other special guests. More details as I get them.This event is sponsored by the Russian American Cultural Center, so it will be a blast. I absolutely hope to see every single one of you there!

Patient Women

The Unbearables vs. The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses for 100 Thousand Poets

The YouTubes are here!

part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOhiTW2r8b0&feature=relmfu
javascript:void(0); Larissa Shmailo--hostess, Bob Holman with musician Al Haji Papa Susso, Jim Feast--emcee, Tsaurah Litzky, Patricia Carragon, Thad Rutkowski, Sarah Sarai, Chavisa Woods, Shmailo, Jordan Zinovich, Annie Pluto.

part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jycWHQqv-eQ&feature=relmfu
Jim Feast--emcee, Bonnie Finberg, Jane Ormerod, Rob Hardin, Patricia Spears Jones, Ron Kolm, Elizabeth Macklin, Susan Scutti, Madeline Artenberg.

part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdewRx3Z9cc&feature=relmfu
Audrey Roth, Jim Feast--emcee, Tom Savage, Sparrow, Steve Dalachinsky, Ronnie Norpel, Carl Watson, Bernard Block, Yuko Otomo, David Henderson, Mitch Corber.