Return Of Your Inner Yeti: Boria Sax And The Zoological Guides To Reality Tomorrow At Curley's

Boria with friends

Poet and zoological folklorist Boria Sax reads once more in the Stamford area, this time featured as part of this Tuesday's PoemAlley program (Boria previously appeared at Frank Chamber's Open Mic in the Stamford Barnes & Noble last April), He has numerous titles to his credit, translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, and Czech, spanning fiction, poetry, history, reference, folklore and, in particular, human/animal relations, both on the naturalistic and metaphorical levels. Choice academic library journal named two books, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust
(Continuum, 2000) and The Mythical Zoo: An Encyclopedia of Animals in Myth, Legend, and Literature (Overlook Press, 2013) among their "outstanding titles of the year".

Boria earned his doctorate in Intellectual History and German from the State University of New York, Buffalo, has served as a human rights consultant for Amnesty International and Helsinki Watch and is founder of Nature in Legend and Story, a non-profit organization fostering appreciation of the

traditional bonds between humans and the natural world. Currently he is leading his first course in creative writing at Mercy College.

His deep fascination for the metaphorical roots of our species' complex and contradictory ties to other living creatures, whether wild, domesticated, or mythic, is best articulated in the introduction to Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human (Reaktion, 2013): "... all imaginary animals, to some degree all animals, are ultimately both monsters and wonders, which assist us by deflecting and absorbing our uncertainties." Depending on our hopes and fears of the moment or the age, "Men and women are not only part angel and part demon, as the old cliché goes; they are also part centaur, part werewolf, part mandrake, and part sphinx."

Below is a video from Overlook Press, publisher of 2012's City of Ravens, where Boria talks of the historical connection between the city of London and its ubiquitous bird population:

Poet's Press, 2010

Boria has received national awards for e-learning, and is a mentor in the Sloan-C Certificate program in online teaching. Currently, he teaches in the graduate literature program of Mercy College, as well as liberal arts courses at Sing Sing and Taconic prisons, where he enjoys the attention of "perhaps the most engaged, interested college students in the world."

"Our Triumphant March Toward Humility", "Animals and Cultural Diplomacy", "Why the French Army Collapsed at Waterloo" and "History and Experience: Revisiting My Childhood In an FBI File" are some of the provocative entries addressing human culture and prospects on the blog he maintains for the Huffington Post, the last addressing his father's role in nuclear espionage during the Cold War. His Stealing Fire: Memoir of a Boyhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage relates these confusing, turbulent years in detail.

His latest project is a cultural history of lizards. For more on his writing, visit boriasax.com.

Christina M. Rau: With Irrepressible Verse In Mind, Purses & Pockets

PoemAlley welcomes teacher and poet/poet advocate Christina M. Rau to Curley’s this Tuesday, author of the chapbooks WakeBreatheMove (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and For The Girls, I (Dancing Girl Press, 2014).

An energetic presence in the greater public appreciation and pursuit of the craft, Christina is the founder of the Long Island reading circuit, Poets In Nassau and is editor of the Nassau Community College’s The Nassau Review (where she also teaches English).

Christina is a member of the Creative Writing Project and has overseen poetry workshops across Long Island. As monthly guest-blogger for Poetry Has Value, she helps demonstrate the practicality of how writers can track both the creative and monetary worth of their efforts and where it can be placed accordingly. Her own work has graced gallery walls in The Ekphrastic Poster Show and car magnets for The Living Poetry Project (Nicelle Davis’ Yes Men-style program to make poetry more prevalent in daily life via secreting bits of verse on slips of paper into clothing in retail settings and other cultural guerrilla tactics). More of her work can be found on Queen Mob’s Tea House and the Australasian Association of Writing Program’s Meniscus online literary magazine.

A recipient of an MFA in Creative Writing from Long Island University-Southampton and an MA in English and Creative Writing from Hofstra, Christina maintains a dynamic online presence through Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and, of course, Facebook, while also managing to post book reviews on Goodreads. Recent posts on her blog, “A Life Of We” cover personal appearances, live concerts and exercise—enthusiastically peppered with stills and videos. 

Check out everything else she does at www.christinamrau.com.

Mark Saba: Landscapes Of Tenderness And Being

Imagistic and knowing, the work of Mark Saba, tomorrow’s featured writer/artist at Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic program, reminds "us of why we are here,” says Annie Dillard, “even as (it) celebrate(s) the uncertainty of being.” Poetry infused with his Polish/Italian heritage, hometown family life in Pittsburgh and a tender awareness for where a good story lies will be read from Painting a Disappearing Canvas (Grayson Books, 2012) and his forthcoming collection, Calling The Names (David Robert Books, early 2017).

His many contributions to literary magazines and anthologies include Connecticut Review, Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press), New Haven Review, The Folio Club, as well as the London-based Litro.

In addition to writing essays and stories, Mark has published several novels, including 2004’s The Landscapes of Pater from Vineyard Press, Signs and Letters From Novosibirsk (two 2014 ebooks from Smashwords). Some of his poetry is accented by beautifully scored and photographed video interpretations, such as the chiaroscuric “He Was a Poet And When He Died”:

 

A Connecticut resident for over 20 years, Mark's applied, clinical duties as a medical illustrator and graphic designer at Yale University are complemented by his vibrant oil paintings, some of which can be viewed on marksabawriter.com.

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 at 100 Greyrock Place), beginning at 7:15 p.m.

 

 

Contact: 203-323-1248