Poetry Reading: Jamalieh Haley & Joseph Lease 730pm @ open space cafe

Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007), and Human Rights(Talisman House, second edition forthcoming). Lease's poems "'Broken World' (For James Assa...tly)" and "Send My Roots Rain" have been selected for Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (Second Edition). "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was also selected for The Best American Poetry 2002.
 
Lease was born in Chicago, and attended Columbia University, Brown University, and Harvard University. He has received The Academy of American Poets Prize, The Henry Evans Fellowship in Poetry, and Fellowships and grants in poetry and poetics from Columbia University, Harvard University, Brown University, and California College of the Arts. He is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts and a member of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

America

my scream is a brand name:

blue -- for a while --

elm trees and summer and birch trees and sky, elm trees and summer and birch trees and sky: expensive houses, expensive houses dying: this lack of justice I acknowledge mine --

America, one extra summer night -- he wants to (you know) feel like a giant eyeball --

Jamalieh Haley lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-curates If Not For Kidnap Poetry series. Her work has been published in Poetry Miscellany, Birds & Whistles, Folio, Poor Claudia, and Small Doggies, and shown at various gallery spaces such as PLACE, Research Club, and Recess. She currently teaches writing and works on several manuscripts at the same time -- a method that has its consequences. She's a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Art.

You have already changed me

look, my dress

is a little white bomb

of outer space

that will slowly murder

the graceful museum

of objects

we are dedicated to preserving

but we are dedicated to preserving

that moment without objects

which pleads the nightmare

to produce breathable air

body I fold

my body into

just back down

the stairs of blackness

out of my little white dress

already exploded