Princeton Makes and Ragged Sky Press‘ Second Sunday Poetry Reading is set for Sunday, September 10, at 4 p.m.
The free event takes place at the Princeton Makes store in the Princeton Shopping Center and features poets Anna M. Evans and Nicole Caruso Garcia.
Evans is the author of “Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic” and “Sisters & Courtesans,” a collection of sonnets. She lives in Hainesport, New Jersey, and teaches at the West Windsor Arts Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. The following is an example of one of her sonnets:
Poet Anna M. Evans reads from her work at Princeton Makes in the Princeton Shopping Center on Sunday, September 10.
Her Shaggy Ally
“You ask of my Companions. Hills — sir — and the Sundown, and a Dog large as myself, that my Father bought me.” — Emily Dickinson, to Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
She said he was a dog as large as she,
which was in point of fact not strictly true
because we know she stood at five foot three
and Newfoundlands are more like three foot two.
One time she sent a friend a lock of hair–
a tawny curl she passed off as her own
when it was his. Carlo went everywhere
with her, so though we think of her alone,
a recluse in an attic dressed in white,
that’s who she came to be once Carlo died.
Before he passed, the pair were quite all right.
She walked round Amherst, Carlo by her side
and in the dying light, their shadows blended—
you couldn’t tell where woman or dog ended.
Nicole Caruso Garcia.
Garcia’s work has appeared in Best New Poets, Light, Mezzo Cammin, ONE ART, Plume, Rattle, and RHINO. In addition to receiving an International Book award for book of narrative poems, “Oxblood,” the Connecticut-based New Jersey native serves as an associate poetry editor at Able Muse. The following sonnet provides a sampling of her work:
Appraisal
Once raped, you wear it daily, learn to see
the cut, the color, clarity, and carat.
Each time you try to square asymmetry,
it cleaves, reveals another jagged facet.
Fool, you think it fits inside one poem.
No, map with calipers and microscope
your story since you came to wear that stone:
flawed and heart-shaped, bluer than the Hope.
Since you must wear it, hone it with precision.
Leave your wrists unslit, the blood unbled
to cut and polish sin to scintillation.
Woman, rise up from the rhinestone-dead.
Yet what can cut a diamond? Nothing can,
except the hardest substance known to man.
The Princeton-based Ragged Sky is a small, cooperative press. It has historically focused on mature voices, overlooked poets, and women’s perspectives.
Princeton Makes, a cooperative comprised of 34 multi-disciplined artists, is located in the Princeton Shopping Center, next to Metropolis Hair Salon.
The free reading is set at 4 p.m. An open mic available to up to 10 audience members interested in reading their original poetry will follow.
For more information on Ragged Sky Press, visit raggedsky.com.
For more information on Princeton Makes events, go to www.princetonmakes.com.
