New Poems: A Reading

C.M. Clark’s poetry has appeared in Gulf Stream magazine and the 10th Anniversary of Tigertail, A South Florida Poetry Annual. Clark served as inaugural Poet-in-Residence at the Deering Estate’s Artist Village in Miami. Clark’s latest work was recently published in Charles Deering Forecasts the Weather & Other Poems. Previous collections include The Blue Hour and the artbook Pillow Talk. In Clark’s latest poetry collection, Dragonfly (Solution Hole Press) she continues her poetic exploits with vigor and with courage, as she deconstructs all three temporal elements—past, present and future—to function simultaneously.

Orlando Ricardo Menes is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches creative writing, literature, and translation.  His latest poetry collections are Heresies and Fetish. He is also the author of Furia and Rumba atop the Stones. His poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as literary magazines like Ploughshares, Harvard Review, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Hudson Review, Shenandoah, Callaloo, Indiana Review, River Styx, Epoch, Spoon River Poetry Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, and Green Mountains Review. His most recent collection Heresies: Poems (University of New Mexico Press), is an invocation of Latin American and Caribbean culture, history, and spirituality. Through free verse and poetic forms, the collection is visually charged and sonically rich. The poems incorporate history, legend, and magical realism to create a cross-cultural baroque feeling. Heresies is witty, probing, transgressive, and carnivalesque.

Cuban-born Pablo Medina is the author four novels, eight poetry collections, three books of translation, and a memoir. Medina's work has appeared in various languages, among them Spanish, French, German and Arabic. He has received numerous awards, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others. Currently, he is professor of fiction and poetry and directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston. Of The Island Kingdom (Hanging Loose Press), Bill Zavatsky writes “Pablo Medina's new book of poems is the work of a mythmaker, a visionary who finds the thrones and powers of his native island in every corner of it, bringing them to us in all their beauty and fury. The color, grace, music and energy that fill these pages ought to harken us (again) to Medina's mastery, for a master-poet he is. ” His latest translation is The Weight of the Island: Selected Poems of Virgilio Piñera (Dialogos). Dramatist, novelist, critic and poet Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979) was one of the greatest writers of twentieth century Cuba. Little known outside the island, his poems have been called "feverishly tropical" and "champions against indifference." With a linguistic skill reminiscent of Borges and a gift for metaphor that rivals Neruda and García Lorca, Piñera's poems celebrate daily life in Cuba with brilliance and humor.

William Kistler studied Literature and Philosophy at Stanford. He was on the board of Poets and Writers from 1976 to 1992 and was president from 1980 to 1985. In 1983 he co-founded Poets House and served as treasurer until 2000. He is the author of four earlier volumes of poetry including The Elizabeth Sequence, which won the Oklahoma Book Award and was the co-editor of a collection of essays Buying America Back. His fifth collection of poetry is In the Middle of Things (Zig-Zag). In these 64 “studies,” the range of form and content—lyric, philosophical, political, cosmic—rivals the most accomplished contemporary poetry. Originality and intellectual fervor are at the heart of Kistler’s work.