Poetry at the UAG Gallery This Friday, Nov 13

Albany Poets and Jawbone are once again combining forces to bring poetry to the UAG Gallery.  This Friday Jawbone will present a reading with James Belflower and Lucyna Prostko followed by our monthly open mic for poetry and spoken word.

Here is the information from the good folks at Jawbone:

Jawbone is pleased to host a first book release party/reading this Friday, November 13th at 6:30pm in the United Artists Guild Gallery (247 Lark Street). Please come early and enjoy a refreshment/chat with the authors.

An open mic hosted by Albany Poets will follow at 8pm.

We hope that you will attend and support two very talented poets and PhD Candidates.

COMMUTER by James Belflower: Modeling the courage of the witness as a compelling poetic subjectivity, COMMUTER attempts to encourage response by negotiating notions of the self. Juliana Spahr calls COMMUTER "a painfully beautiful and transformatively aestheticized book."

James Belflower is the author of Commuter (Instance Press) and And Also a Fountain, (NeOpepper Press) a collaborative echap with Anne Heide and J. Michael Martinez. He won the 2007 Juked Magazine poetry prize and his work  appears, or is forthcoming in: Jacket, EOAGH, Denver Quarterly, Apostrophe Cast, First Intensity, Reconfigurations, Konundrum Engine and O&S, among others. He curates PotLatchpoetry.org, a website dedicated to the gifting and exchange of poetry resources.

Infinite Beginnnings—Lucyna Prostko's fierce, quiet book shines like the
wooden boat in "Homecoming" that "beckons the winds with all its power."  Prostko makes poetic speech feel somehow inevitable, yet unexpected and fresh; there is nothing self-conscious, no straining for high art, in her mastery. "The human stories in her poems haunt me. . . . Clear-eyed and steadfast in her honesty, Prostko doesn't pretend to easy understanding of the mystery she touches at the deep heart of our being, but her love for the world is palpable in every poem"--Joan Larkin, Judge, Bright Hill Poetry Book Competition.

Lucyna Prostko was born in 1971 in Poland, where she grew up in a small village of Solistowka in Mazury. From an early age, she has been immersed in the stories of her grandparents' lives who have been tragically affected by the outbreak of World War II. She came to New York City at the age of 19. She received her BA degree in English from Hunter College and MFA in poetry from New York University, where she was awarded The New York Times Fellowship. She has been writing poetry in both Polish and English, and her work has been influenced by both Polish and American poets, in particular Boleslaw Lesmian, Czeslaw Milosz, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Wislawa Szymborska as well as Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, and Louise Gluck. Her poetry has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Fugue, Washington Square, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ellipsis, Quiddity, Five Points, and other literary magazines and in her collection, Infinite Beginnings, judged winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition by Joan Larkin and published by Bright Hill in 2009. She has been teaching literature and creative writing for the past ten years. She currently teaches at Queensbury High School in upstate New York and pursues Ph.D. in English at SUNY Albany. She lives on Hunt Lake in the Adirondacks with her husband, Mirko.

The evening starts at 6:30PM with the “No Gimmicks Open Mic” hosted by Mary Panza will begin after the two featured poets at 8:00PM.  Sign up for the open mic will be available throughout the night.