Manzanita Writers' Series Presents
Poetry Reading
Sunday, April 14th
4 p.m. in the Main Room
FREE, Walk-ins welcomed,
Pre-registrations appreciated
Join us for another Airlie Press book launch. This time poets Val Witte and Joy Manesiotis will read from their new works.
In addition, the winners of the Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize, Florence Sage, Marianne Monson, and Garth Upshaw, will read their winning poems.
Valerie Witte, A Rupture in the Interiors
Polyphony of silk and skin, A Rupture in the Interiors is a rapturous exploration of im/perfection, threading innovative
Valerie Witte
form and histories of value—of the female body, especially, and of material worth—with dream logic and associative mastery. This is a modern tapestry of everyday traumas that, while seemingly minor, mark us all as participants in the human experience. Woven together, these images of disorder and defect tell a story of the superficial damage that runs deep, and that cannot slip from us unseen or unfelt.
Valerie Witte is the author of multiple poetry and hybrid books, including A Rupture in the Interiors (Airlie, 2023), a game of correspondence (Black Radish, 2015) and, in collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal, The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019), the first of a two-part project exploring the work of postmodern dancer-choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. The second book in the project, a collection of experimental essays, is One Thing Follows Another (punctum books, forthcoming 2024). She works as a book editor in Portland, OR, where she lives with her husband, Andrew. More at valeriewitte.com.
Joy Manesiotis, Revoke
Layered in overlapping movements, Revoke draws on the poet’s early training in visual art and film, as well as the form of the lament in Greek culture, both ancient and contemporary. Poem by poem, the collection becomes symphonic, rising and
Joy Manesiotis
falling through cycles of multivocality, sound, repetition, and silence. Levels of loss—of mothers and mothering, of the complexities of female agency—are sounded and measured in fragmented, cinematic shifts between image and event as if to investigate how discursive gestures and the lyric, when fractured, can turn in tension to refute linearity, yet still create vivid moments of human time and experience. Revoke shows us how the epic can be embodied in lyric form, holding all and telling all, with the precision, beauty, and complexity that grief, and all human experience, deserves.
Joy Manesiotis is the author of three collections of poetry, A Short History of Anger, which won The New Measure Poetry Prize from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, Revoke, recently published by Airlie Press, and They Sing to Her Bones, which won The New Issues Poetry Prize. In collaboration with a theatre director, she is staging A Short History of Anger: A Hybrid Work of Poetry & Theatre—comprised of a Speaker and Greek Chorus—at international festivals and universities in the U.S. and Europe. Poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and others, as well as in translation, in the Romanian journal, Scrisul Romanesc. Manesiotis has received fellowships and residencies from New York Foundation for the Arts, The Graves Award, and Ragdale Foundation and her poems were dropped over Nicosia, Cyprus as part of Spring Poetry Rain, an international cultural event to help foster peace in the last divided city in Europe. Previously the Edith R. White Distinguished Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, she now lives in Portland and Neahkahnie. More information: joymanesiotis.com
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