As tomorrow night’s featured poet at Barnes & Noble’s
Open Mic program, Pat Mottola will read selections from her first collection, Under a Red Dress (Five Oaks Press, 2016), demonstrating how the title’s diaphanous image is used to unify
musings on human sensuality and connection, consolation and longing,
expressed through the varied portraits of people, times and artifacts, from struggling
veterans and temptresses, to old family photos and her immediate family, such
as her mother, who never “caught up to Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan”.
Beyond inter-generational experience, though, Wally Swist (Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love)
characterizes the work of the Puscart Prize nominee as mining “a millennial loneliness that can
be as sexy as a red dress.”
The universal, often repressed tension of relationships
buoyed or pushed down by external expectations and circumstance is insightfully
enlivened in her Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize-winning ekphrastic piece, inspired
by the Edward Hopper oil painting of the same name.
Room in New York, 1932 –after Edward Hopper
See for yourself––look through the open window.
Come closer, as if you were invited. My husband
buries his head in the newspaper. Tell him I’m here,
I wear the red dress because loneliness is quiet.
If nothing else, the room is honest. Between us,
only the bare wooden table. And the door. Outside,
the ledge and window meet, greet you like a black-edged
announcement. I turn away, one finger poised
on the keys of the piano, threaten to break the silence
that fills the room. I could reach for the door.
Instead I face away, as if I am not looking
for a way out, as if you couldn’t imagine my story.
You can also click here for writer/director John
Kaiser’s own brief film interpretation of the same vignette, starring Anna
Rosselli and Jason Heil.
Pat teaches Creative Writing at Southern Connecticut
State University, where she received both an M.S. in Art Education and an
M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Besides her work with SCSU students, she is thrilled
to teach both art and poetry to senior citizens throughout the state and is
especially proud of her most recent undertaking, mentoring Afghan women through
the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.
She has placed work
in numerous journals including War, Literature & the Arts, VietNow Magazine, Paterson Literary Review and the San Pedro River Review, whose co-editor, Jeffrey Alfier, admires
her poetry as “sweeping, heartfelt, and skillfully rendered”.
Besides her roles as
co-president of the Connecticut Poetry Society and co-editor of Connecticut River Review, Pat’s love and
advocacy of the form is well-represented not only by her serving as keynote speaker
for the IMPAC-Young Writers Award and study with major poets from across
the country, but also via such playful engagement via a website quiz inviting visitors to match photos of acclaimed
poets with particular quotes.
Hosted by Frank Chambers, 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 Town Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.
For more information, contact:
Barnes & Noble
100 Greyrock Place, Suite H009
Stamford, CT 06906
203-323-1248
