Tuesdays at Curley's

Welcome to PoemAlley, Stamford, Connecticut's eclectic venue for poets, poetry reading and discussion! Open to anyone living in Fairfield County and the surrounding area, we meet Tuesday nights at 7:30 pm at Curley's Diner on 62 Park Place (behind Target) . Come contribute, get something to eat, or simply listen!



May 4, 2015

Grace Under (The Sanction) Of Pressure: An Evening With Rowyda Amin

Stamford resident Rowyda Amin will share selections tomorrow evening from her latest chapbook, Desert Sunflowers (Flipped Eye Press, 2014), praised by Lauri Ramey as “a study of migration and a negotiation between place… notions of identity and self (and) so much more.” Previous appearances have included many events in the UK, including the Ledbury Poetry Festival, the Brighton Festival and the Royal Festival Hall.

Born in Newfoundland of Saudi Arabian and Irish parents, Rowyda has lived in Riyadh and London before moving to Connecticut. She won first prize in the 2012 Venture Award for poetry chapbooks from Flipped Eye. 

Her work and reviews have run in Magma, Modern Poetry in Translation, Wasafiri (for which she was awarded their New Writing Prize in 2009) and other print and online magazines; anthology appearances include Ten (Bloodaxe Books 2010), Bird Book: Towns, Parks, Gardens and Woodland, (a 2011 Sidekick Books collection of poetry and illustration celebrating British birds), Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Cinnamon Press, 2012) and Coin Opera (Sidekick, 2009) and Exposure (Cinnamon Press, 2010).

Rowyda's deft and versatile approach is typified by elements of quiet surprise and magic realism mixed with moments of emotional complexity to illuminate matters of isolation and belonging, as reflected in this intimate example from Coin Opera:





Café Danube
He stayed behind the fridge until he was sure
there was no one left, then stepped through
the litter of glass and abandoned suppers
to the podium with the Yamaha synth.
He righted the stool and played, as he did
most evenings, the themes from Love Story,
Casablanca and Titanic. Rain squalled
through the empty door frames. A dog
entered, shook itself, licked the cream
from a fallen éclair and urinated on the leg
of a waiter, which was sticking out
from behind the bar. The pianist broke
for a whiskey then switched to show tunes.
Water pooled into the centre of the room.
He heard claps, far off but getting louder.



“The Dwarf” performed by the late Geoffrey Lewis and the storytelling group Celestial Navigations strikes a consonant note with Rowyda’s themes that are of special relevance in today’s highly-globalized society, where the received authority of a few to define matters of social acceptance and human grace is too often automatically reinforced by everyone else:


Find out more about Rowyda at www.rowyda.com.




No comments:

Post a Comment