Read This: Of Lamb

The poet Matthea Harvey has collaborated with artist Amy Jean Porter to create Of Lamb, an “illustrated erasure” that retells the story of Mary and her little lamb using a Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Charles Lamb as its foundation. Harvey’s short poems were created by taking a page from the biography and stripping away all but a few words, around which Porter creates an illustration. I haven’t seen all the artwork for this, but what I have seen has been fantastic, so the judgment of Bitch‘s Lindsay Baltus that “Harvey and Porter have taken a book about a stuffy second-rate 19th century writer, written by an equally stuffy aristocrat-cum-biographer, and turned it into the very colorful tale of a woman’s deep love for her woolly friend” seems on the mark. And Porter’s original drawings will be exhibited at the P.P.O.W. Gallery beginning in late June, so I’ll probably go check them out!

10 May 2011 | poetry, read this |

Rose Hunter, “The Statues of Illustrious Men”

These three
face the cathedral
and are the ones I can see from
where I’m sitting:
Marcelino García Barragán
(militar y gobernante),
a leg, a bite of torso,
a dangling arm;
Dr. Leonardo Oliva
(dr cientifico), bisected; and
Manuel M. Diéguez (general,
precursor, revolucionario);
sword obscured by the shrubs

beyond the fence and the inclining
lawn; leaves and red flowers
over his chest: an abandoned
pompom.

(—at the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres, Guadalajara)

To the River is a collection of poems from Rose Hunter. It also includes “Out of Detroit on the Greyhound” (originally published in Quay), “Walking into the Wynn, Las Vegas, and You Are Stitched Into” (Referential), “He Is No Pinkerton” (Juked), and “Even” (Leaf Press).

Hunter is also the founder of YB Poetry, an online journal that will be publishing its fourth issue this summer.

13 April 2011 | poetry |