Barnes &
Noble’s Open Mic guest this Monday night is Connecticut native Charlie Bondhus,
last year’s Main Street Rag Poetry Award-winner for All the Heat We Could Carry, his latest collection, and finalist for
the Gival Press Poetry Book Award.
A prolific
contributor to many publications covering an impressively wide geographical and
editorial swath (the Hawai'i Review, the Alabama Literary Review, not to mention CounterPunch,
the online and print publication of social and political commentary), Charlie’s
versatility of theme and construction is supported by a unifying attention to
vibrant imagery and emotive detail.
Compare the intimate, yet broadly filial
tone of the sample below with “Looking Back” , “Syria” and “Return Ghazal”,
a trio of pieces from last November's Poets' Basement posting on CR, which invoke the same human dimension as "October", but applied to the financial/political connivance behind the pursuit of global hegemony by framing current scenarios of visceral and ethical
razing within a mythological conscience:
October
Five
months after coming home,
you stomp
out to the yard
after I
insist on helping you,
the rake’s
tines scraping the driveway,
making a
nails-on-chalkboard sound.
I watch
from the window, hurt but admiring
the ease
with which you roll
the
season’s lovely casualties
into large
and small heaps,
working
until a sudden gust
turns the
morning’s labor
into a
firestorm,
red and
yellow clumps breaking apart
and
spreading themselves across the lawn.
You return
in the evening
sweat-covered
and dirty,
leaning on
your rake,
bearing,
by way of apology,
the last
chrysanthemums of the season,
a dying
man
rediscovering
his beauty.
Charlie graduated from Saint Anselm College, received his MFA from Goddard College and his Ph.D. from the University of
Massachusetts. He teaches English and
creative writing at Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey.
Previous collections include How the Boy Might See It (Pecan Grove Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2007 Blue Light Press First Book Award, and two chapbooks, What We Have Learned to Love (winner of the Brickhouse Books’ 2008-2009 Stonewall Award) and Monsters and Victims (Gothic Press, 2010). Click here to enjoy this playful tribute (along with other videos), "Epithalamium to Myself and Walt Whitman", performed in 2009 at Amherst Books.
And click here if you would like to correspond with Charlie
and keep up with his activities on Facebook.
Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes & Noble's Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Down Center), now beginning at 7:00 p.m.
For more information:
Barnes & Noble
100 Greyrock Place Suite H009
Stamford, CT 06901
203-323-1248
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