A Celebration, Two Homecomings And Two Guest Readings!

Welcoming Curley’s Diner co-owner/poet Eleni Begetis Anastos back from her family wedding in Greece tonight at PoemAlley is fellow Tuesday Night Live contributor Susan Cosette—herself returning to Stamford since moving out of state last year--and John Stanton, scuba diver/instructor, poet and novelist.

A former student of Marilyn Nelson at the University of Connecticut, Susan is a two-time winner of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize and presently serves as Annual Fund and Communications Manager for the Minneapolis non-profit Way To Grow, devoted to closing the educational gap in the Twin Cities area, where she currently resides. 

Addressing a broad range of subjects, Susan wrote the piece below last February in response to Trump's prescription for school shootings, exhibiting a consistent combination of immediacy and emotional detail.

#Enough

I hid in a closet while my best friend was killed.

I texted my sister.

I love you. 

Tell Mom and Dad to get here, fast.

I don’t want to die.

Thirty of us in a closet,

Paper plates for fans.

This is not supposed to happen here.

The police came.

If you had a bag, you had to drop it in a pile.

Then, three questions—

Are you hurt?

Did you capture anything on phone or video?

Do know anything about the gunman?

After that they let us leave.

The guns have changed,

Our laws have not.

Your rights to own a gun—

All I hear is mine, mine, mine.

You can buy as many guns as you want at one time.

A kid in a candy store of AK-15 blood.

I refuse to be the kid you read about in textbooks,

The statistic.

We don’t want your thoughts and prayers—

We want policy and change.

You, President,

I dare you.

Tell me to my face—

It was a terrible tragedy,

It should never have happened.

How much money did you get from the National Rifle Association?

You want to know something?

It doesn't matter, because I already know.

Thirty million dollars.

Divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States

In the one and one-half months in 2018 alone,

That’s $5,800.

Is that how much we are worth?

Shame on you.

There is no hashtag for our grief.

Click here for information on her recent collection, Peggy Sue Messed Up.  Susan’s latest  work can be found at www.musepalace.wordpress.com.

John Stanton’s 20 years working in the scuba industry has encompassed travel, teaching, diving under ice and into shipwrecks, as well as his first published article for a 1986 issue of Skin Diver. Besides subsequent work for technical manuals and other non-fiction, John also updated in 2008 A Jesuit In Belize, a family memoir by William Kane, first released in the 1920s, of Father William ‘Buck’ Stanton and his remarkable humanitarian experiences as teacher, scientist and explorer as a missionary in turn-of the-century Central America.

John’s own wont for relaxed, irreverent observations on random topics finds expression in poetry and rhyme in the collection Pooplets Of Truth (Stanton Lonestar Books, 2014) which, he assures, is “never vulgar or laced with subliminal messages from another dimension.” His 2010 performance of “3^rd Grade” at the Southern Playhouse, Minneapolis brings to mind both Jean Shepard and Lenny Bruce:  

His fiction manuscripts have made the quarter finals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Of the Year and the semifinals in the Clive Cussler Society Adventure Writer Contest (named after the acclaimed author of Raise the Titanic!, Cyclops and many other titles featuring marine engineer/adventurer Dirk Pitt).

John’s own rollicking entry into the nautical/techno-thriller genre, The Lone Star Used Submarine Company (Gabriel's Horn Publishing, 2012) finds struggling commercial diver Buck Davies leading a makeshift crew in flight throughout the Caribbean in an old Soviet submarine, after he thwarted the corrupt Cuban official who attempted to swindle him in its sale. Bumbling from island to island, Buck and his friends encounter pirates, eccentric characters and romance while eluding the navies of the world.

In his other novel, a toilet paper salesman, a dominatrix and a general share center stage with Cassandra Vega, the traumatized heroine of The Truth About UFOs, Aliens and All That, (Gabriel's Horn, 2009) when humanity’s collective expectations about the existence and character of flying saucer aliens somehow wills the little guys into existence—and no one knows what their plans are.

Learn more about all of John’s projects, including the forthcoming, Imagine Somewhere Else (not to mention what is his favorite book, preferred liquor and most memorable shark encounter) at www.johnstantonbooks.com.