| Two and Two Denise Duhamel’s much anticipated new collection of poetry begins with a revisionist tale – Noah is married to Joan of Arc – in a poem about America’s often flawed sense of history. “Here come the high spirits, good nature, smartass deduction, brassy intelligence, form-bending generosity, and large-hearted liberal brio of Denise Duhamel’s new poems,” writes Albert Goldbarth. Throughout Two and Two, doubles abound: Noah’s animals, Duhamel’s parents as Jack and Jill in a near-fatal accident; an incestuous double sestina: a male/female pantoum; a dream and its interpretation; and translations of advertisements from English into Spanish. In two Möbius strip poems (shaped like the Twin Towers), Duhamel invites her readers to get out their scissors and tape and transform her poems into 3-D objects. At the book’s center is “Love Which Took Its Symmetry for Granted,” a gathering of journal entries, personal emails, and news reports into a collage of witness about September 11. Publishers Weekly says that this poem “is one of the few versifications of the tragedy and its aftermath that is genuinely affecting,” and will give “people who never buy books of poetry” a “compelling reason to buy this one.” A section of Mille et un sentiments, modeled on the lists of Hervé Le Tellier’s Mille Pensées, breaks down emotions into their most basic levels, their 1,001 tiny recognitions ranging from the silly “I feel open to the Holy Potato and its Holy Eyes” to the sardonic “I feel bad about the bomb I dropped on your country – I pressed the wrong button.” The book ends with “Carbó Frescos,” written in the form of an art guidebook from the 24th century. Innovative and unpretentious, Duhamel uses twice the language usually available for poetry. She culls from the literary and nonliterary, from the Bible and product warning labels, from Woody Allen films and Hong Kong action movies – to say difficult things with astonishing accuracy. Two and Two is second to none. Denise Duhamel’s dozen or so previous books include Kinky (Orchard Press) – poems from the perspective of Barbie dolls – Star Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Mille et un sentiments, a limited edition book. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she teaches creative writing at Florida International University at Miami. --Pittsburgh University Press
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| Wednesday, April 25, 2007 • Denise will also be visiting various classes. Call 743-2210 for times. • 12:30pm - 2:00 pm • Miller Auditorium • Dearlove Hall |
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| Denise will also be visiting various classes. Call 743-2210 for times. | ||
| From "The Mother of the World" Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi exile, came to the American public’s attention when he returned to Iraq in 2003 after the American invasion to report on the effects of “liberation.” He co-produced and co-directed the resulting film documentary, About Baghdad, as part of InCounter Productions, in which he interviews a variety of laborers, children, government workers and cabdrivers. “Although those interviewed unanimously despised the government of Mr. Hussein,” states a New York Times review, “the speakers are divided on the subject of American presence in Iraq. They evince a complex set of attitudes toward their new American occupiers, by turns angry, resigned, hopeful and even witty.” In an essay for Al-Ahram Weekly, Antoon explains that Baghdad was once considered “the mother of the world...It was so sophisticated and elegant in its golden age that an Arabic verb, yatabaghdadu, was derived from its name to signify how people used to emulate the coveted styles and ways of Baghdad’s elites...Thousands of invisible umbilical cords still bind the city to many a soul. With every bomb, missile and fire that has erupted over the last three weeks in Baghdad, I have felt the pain of those cords being violently severed in my heart.” Antoon, a journalist and poet born in 1967, had to flee Iraq in 1991 after the Gulf War and has been teaching literature in the United States ever since. His book of poetry – Mawshur Muballal bil-Huroob (A Prism: Wet with Wars) – and a novel – I’jam (Diacritics) – were published in Arabic and will soon be released in English. He has published poems and essays in both Arabic and English, co-translated the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, and was nominated for the PEN Prize for translation in 2004. He is a senior editor for Arab Studies Journal, a contributing editor to Banipal, and a member of the editorial committee of Middle East Report. |
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| Wednesday, March 28, 2007 • 7 pm - 9 pm • Visual Arts Gallery • Dearlove Hall |
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| Insights into the Arab-American: Diana Abu-Jaber Diana Abu-Jaber was born in Syracuse to an American mother and a Jordanian father. When she was seven, her family moved to Jordan the two years, and she has lived between the U.S. and Jordan ever since. Life was a constant juggling act, acting Arab at home, but American in the street. The struggle to make sense of this sort of "inbetweeness" permeates Abu-Jaber's fiction. Her first novel, Arabian Jazz, considered be many to be the first mainstream Arab-American novel, won the 1994 Oregon Book Award and prompted Jean Grant of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs to say, "Abu-Jaber's movel will probably do more to convince readers to abandon what media analyst Jack Shaheen calls American's 'abhorrence of the Arab' than any number f speeches or publicity gambits". Her second novel, Crescent (W.W. Norton 2003), which was inspired by Shakespeare's Othello, is set in comtemporary Los Angeles and focuses on a multi-cultural love story between and Iraqi exile and Iraqi-American chef. "Written in a lush, lyrical style reminiscent of The God of Small Things, infused with the flavors and scents of Middle Eastern food, and spiced with history and fable. Crescent is a sensuous love story and a gripping tale of risk and committment." It won the PEN Center Award for Literacy Fiction and the American Book Award and has been published in eight countries to date. Her latest book is a culinary memoir entitled The Language of Baklava (Pantheon 2005), which Entertainment Weekly calls "as delectable for its stories as for its accompanying recipes." Describing her experiences growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, the author develops each chapter around one of her father's traditional Middle Eastern recipes. --Lyceum Agency
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| Friday, March 30, 2007 • 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm • Visual Arts Gallery • Dearlove Hall |
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| Iraqi Exile Born in Baghdad, Dunya Mikhail has published four collections of poetry and one multi-genre book in Arabic, including The Psalms of Absence (Iraq 1993), Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (Iraq 1995 and Egypt 2000), and Almost Music (Tunisia 1997). Mikhail who witnessed and wrote about the atrocities committed by the fascist authorities under Saddam Hussein as well as the tradegy of the Iraq-Iran war of the eighties and the Gulf War of the nineties, had to flee Iraq like so many Iraqi writer to escape increasingly threatening harassment. |
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| Monday, April 02, 2007 • 12:30 - 2:00 pm • Visual Arts Gallery • Dearlove Hall |
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| Bruce Guernsey: From Illinois to Maine Many will value the transparency and directness of Bruce Guernsey’s poetry, which ranges from confessional narratives, as in the poems about his father’s war experience and aftermath, to cryptic wordplay. Readers will also sense Guernsey’s kinship to Robert Frost as strongly as they will feel his connection to nature both soft and severe. Martin Scott, an Eastern Illinois University colleague, wrote that Guernsey’s poems “are the sort of gems that slip through your fingers if you don’t hold onto them right. Cold-blooded, taut little masterpieces, their ‘loneliness includes [us] unawares’ in an emptiness ‘so much nearer home’ than we had dreamed.” He has published three books of poetry, the earliest of which, January Thaw, was first published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and was reissued by Water Press and Media. His second book, Peripheral Vision, was published by Small Poetry Press, a design and printing service for self-publishing. His latest book of poetry, The Lost Brigade (Water Press and Media 2004), is “a powerful indictment of the war of how we bear its scars forever,” writes Chris Hedges. Guernsey is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Eastern Illinois University where he taught creative writing and American Literature for twenty-five years. A graduate with honors from Colgate University, he holds M.A.’s from the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from New Hampshire, writing his dissertation on tools as metaphors in Robert Frost’s poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, and American Scholar. “Apple” was featured on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” The recipient of fellowships in writing from the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he was also a featured poet in Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry.” Beginning [this past January], he [took] over the editorship of Spoon River Poetry Review. His essay, “The Raven’s Gift,” won the creative nonfiction award from the journal Flyway. The recipient of Fulbright Lectureships to Portugal and Greece, Bruce has twice sailed around the world with Semester at Sea. For his teaching, Dr. G. Was awarded seven faculty excellence awards while at EIU, and in 1992 was awarded the State of Illinois Board of Governors’ Distinguished Professor Award. --Adapted from www.BruceGuernsey.com
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| Monday, April 16, 2007 • 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm • Visual Arts Gallery • Dearlove Hall |
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| Bruce will also be visiting various classes. Call 743-2210 for times. | ||