SAL Essay Series
Writers preview the Seattle Arts & Lectures Poetry Series
Author: Staff
Flight by Flame: On Chris Abani’s Smoking the Bible
“By stitching the mundane to the profound, Abani renders a reclamation of a tender masculinity, an understanding of the relationship between joy and trauma, and a pursuit of the sacred.” –Indira Dahlstrom
A Poet of the American Storm: On Landscape with Bloodfeud by Wendy Barnes
“To be vulnerable means also to know one’s own capacity for harm . . .”–Amy Klein
JESSICA JOHNSON
Of Knowledge: The Vast, Provisional Body
You full of night, night full of you.
The Many Desires of Kate Baer
“The trouble with wanting . . . is that the relationship between the public and private self’s desires is an ever-evolving matter.” –Margot Kahn
Giving Prominence
“Under Reginald Dwayne Betts’s watch, redaction becomes a beacon . . . a lightness under the weight shines through.” –Stacy D. Flood
AL YOUNG
Two Poems
Just tell me who the hell am I?
What powers did I, do I hold?
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
On The Way
I feel like a child, younger than this girl; I’m
telling about parents as if I still had them . . .
AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER
Two Poems
We are puppets, all parts of us
connected by strings, by loose wishes
GENNY LIM
Two Poems
Wind and darkness, like the cuckoo
Who returns from far off lands