POETRY READING AND BOOK LAUNCH FOR IMPLEXURES,

BY KAREN MAC CORMACK, PUBLISHED BY TUCSON’S CHAX PRESS

and ENGLAND’S WEST HOUSE BOOKS

 

This event will take place at Dinnerware Art Gallery, 210 N. Fourth Avenue, at 7pm Saturday, October 4. It is free and open to the public. (Contributions in support of POG/Chax Press are welcome.)  An auxiliary event, a talk and discussion with Karen Mac Cormack, will be held on Friday, October 3, at 3pm, at the University of Arizona Modern Languages Building, Room 451. It is also free and open to the public. 

The innovative Canadian Poet Karen Mac Cormack will appear at a reading and book launch for her new book from Chax Press, titled Implexures. This event is sponsored by Chax Press and cosponsored by POG, the UA Poetry Center, and Dinnerware. The Canada Council for the Arts has provided travel funding. Chax Press is grateful for the support of the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Tucson Pima Arts Council, as well as the donations of many individuals.

 

Biography of Karen Mac Cormack:

Residing in Toronto, Canada, born in Luanshya, Zambia, Karen Mac Cormack is the author of  At Issue, Fit to Print, The Tongue Moves Talk (also Chax Press), Marine Snow, Quirks and Quillets (also Chax Press), Quill Driver, Straw Cupid, Multiplex, and Nothing by Mouth. Her work has been published (in print, online, and in translation) in North America, England, France, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden, Australia, Japan, and Belgium, and in anthologies in Canada, the USA, and England, including the Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative North American Poetry , ed. Doug Messerli (Sun and Moon Press), Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK, ed. Maggie O’Sullivan (Reality Street Editions) and in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, ed. Mary Margaret Sloan (Talisman House).

 

Karen Mac Cormack’s new book, Implexures, co-published by Tucson’s Chax Press and West House Books of Sheffield in the UK, will be featured for the first time anywhere at the reading and book launch and will be available for purchase. It retails for $16.

 

Chax Press is a nonprofit literary and book arts press based in Tucson.

 

Contact Charles Alexander,  520-620-1626 for more information.

 

Excerpt from Implexures

Molecules might not have been as confused as I thought probable, the two from the northern hemisphere less seven and a return to places in it for all three within half those years. The dog was quarantined. So to Saxon Doom from Norse Lag always defying definition as many marriages attest. Elsewhere (the word emblematic of my vocabulary) other photographs were taken, letters direct us to “Mc or Mac” no longer prefixed island surnames. In the Sudan the Anwar Dam covers the spot exactly (planes had propellers then) and figs greeted us to so many palms.

The disappointments of a generation skewed by cynicism or performance mean the wars inhabit some individuals on an ongoing basis and not only those of the twenty-first century. Cousins married each other more often than not, an act perhaps “devastating to humour.” Recognize the ache for what it is, reside there, not knowing opinions, hear a rosary of sunsets with the bells. Disowned as much for himself as her English one. (One false step beyond the Cliffs of Moher into the fog and so to sea.)

For these are the characters — sense of direction, observed movements, “time of our lives.” The tableaux run through themselves. To absorb a history of family through the centuries requires a forebear’s attention to facts and no fear of paper. Remember this. The nights are a time of chosen light, days an elaborate grafting.

(end of excerpt)