The Switch presents poets Nathan Wade Carter, Sarah Dowling & Rachel Zolf
When: Monday, September 22, doors at 6:30 p.m., reading at 7 pm sharp. FREE
Where: IPRC, 1001 SE Division St., Portland, OR
Nathan Wade Carter is a poet, musician and artist living in Portland, Oregon. His poetry can be found most recently in Potluck Magazine and on InkNode. He writes and performs music under the name Purrbot. His music can be found on Bandcamp and Spotify. Find him online at nathanwadecarter.com.
Sarah Dowling is the author of DOWN, Birds & Bees, and Security Posture, winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Selections from her work appear in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Her critical work has appeared in American Quarterly, GLQ, Canadian Literature, Signs and elsewhere. Dowling is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.
Rachel Zolf’s fifth book of poetry is Janey’s Arcadia (Coach House, Fall 2014), an aversive, conversive reckoning with the ongoing errors of Canadian settler-colonialism. Other publications include Neighbour Procedure (2010) and Human Resources (2007), which won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Among her many collaborations with other artists, she wrote the film The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture, directed by New York artist Josiah McElheny, which premiered at Art Basel Miami 2012. She has taught at The New School and the University of Calgary, and has recently returned to her hometown, Toronto.
by Nathan Wade Carter:
DO I MAKE RAINBOWS?
Do you bounce when thrown? Do you shatter like temperature?
Am I clear matter of some kind? Do I distort light and make rainbows?
Do I make this light or leaden?
Do I heave this cloud up like a bad hat?
by Sarah Dowling:
I’VE GOT TO TELL YOU
Can you Can you Can you Can
I promise you If we talk and you know
But see
I don’t know if I
shouldn’t tell but if
I let you You can’t I’m talking Are you
I’m not lonely just Is it, Is it Say yes
or say no Cause I really Tell me are
you wet Oh
Boy Won’t you If you tell you know
that I shouldn’t let you but
If I let You can’t tell I’m proud I hope
I’m not Is it Is it Cause I really
Tell me are you that
somebody listen Cause I really Tell me are
you can’t
tell I’m talking if that’s
difficult I hope I’m not
lost just Say Is it Cause I really Tell me are you that
somebody Cause I really You can’t
tell I’m talking further
by Rachel Zolf:
JANEY'S INVOCATION
Infallible settlers say this is the latest season
they have known. All seed life seems somnolent,
yet a delicate suggestion of colour is at the tips
of the willows. An insidious, slow-moving process
is at work in the trees – one that spells from death
-car to drive more slowly unto drouth-world. The wine
of spring aflush on the face THE COPS- FIND- 2 J3<3
I H • ^ \ Hn is a Goad of Death Gourd of chanqts Takt
Life is totally totally lonely of Nature. Dearth is
the only reality we’ve got left in our nicey-nicey-
clean-ice-cream-tv scraps, so we’d better worship
the long wall of skulls next to the ball park. The delay
only whets our monstrosity. A unique beauty about
this pre-vernal landscape before it is screened
by red-brown colour, air and surface, semi-thick –
a boldness suggestive of how Janey and the rest
of the people witnessed the Italian primitifs
in ‘wild’ societies where the word ‘why’
can’t exist. With a minimum of means we
get a maximum of expression.
The Switch presents poets Allison Cobb and Jacqueline Waters.
When: Saturday, August 16, doors at 6 p.m., reading at 6:30 sharp. FREE
Where: IPRC, 1001 SE Division St., Portland, OR
Jacqueline Waters is the author of One Sleeps the Other Doesn't (Ugly Duckling Presse) and A Minute without Danger (Adventures in Poetry). Recent poems have appeared in Fanzine, The American Reader, Everyday Genius and With+Stand. She edits The Physiocrats, a pamphlet press, and lives in Brooklyn.
Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School) about a nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times called Green-Wood “a gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic gem.” She is at work on Plastic: an autobiography, a hybrid genre work, and a poetry manuscript called After we all died.
by Jacqueline Waters
DON’T BE UPSET IF YOU DON’T HEAR FROM ME
Ranchers lease land from the government
At very low rates
That do not make up for the money spent by the government
To manage the land for the ranchers
Each rancher goes to sleep with a blanket
It doesn’t stop there
Ranchers get sex in places we don’t know about
The sex is hot or good
The sex doesn’t stop there
Ranchers were so mad about 200 coyotes loose in their area
So the government said OK we’ll shoot them from helicopters
When the coyotes died it was OK
Because animals die all the time they are used to it
You like this cake I’ll cut you a slice
A sliver
It’s just a worthless sliver
If it were me I would be more circumspect about it
I would be less going on about it
I’d tear its branches off and act like I hadn’t thought about it
Decorate the tree half and shove it out there to sit
by Allison Cobb
The things you loved
I lived to haunt you. To ask
you to hold this oldest
piece of human
DNA beneath
your tongue—it’s shit
dug up from wave-
cut caves in the Summer
Lake basin of Oregon, mixed
with red fox, wolf, coyote—animals they
ate or later came to pee
on their remains. Hold this and think
the thing you love
the most what you most want
inside you, mixed in
with your excrement in fifteen
thousand years when someone
digs it up. Think
the thing you loved so much
you conjured it in labs to live
inside the flesh of every animal to saturate
your own well-fatted flanks, king
of all the creatures. So these
must be the names for things you loved
so much you peed on all the earth
and all its living things which you then ate
to concentrate its thickest dose inside
your pearl-white fat and rearrange your
DNA and gene expression: aldrin, dieldrin, DDT,
mirex, toxaphene, and TCDD. Heptachlor, hexa
-chlorobenzene, and the PCBs nestled in your
genes with you and chlordecone and the hexa
-chlorocyclohexanes. All
the things you loved.
