Observable Readings

A Poetic Version of "The Office," a Song of Southern Race Relations, and a Prose Poem Conversation with Edgar Degas on Jan. 14

Monday, November 30, 2009 at 08:55 PM: Chuck Sweetman, Stacey Lynn Brown, and Allison Benis White

Chuck Sweetman is a lecturer in English literature and associate director of English writing courses at Washington University.    His first collection of poems, Enterprise Inc., published in 2008 by Dream Horse Press, has been described as a poetic version of the television show The Office.  This book includes the poems that appeared in a chapbook titled Incorporated, which won the Dream Horse Press Chapbook Prize.  Poet Jason Sommer has this to say about Enterprise, Inc.: "The enterprise here is in the way Chuck Sweetman gets the voices from--gives voice to--those denizens of the contemporary counting houses seldom heard in contemporary poetry: the white-collared, computer-screened, entry-leveled, and encubicled.”  Sweetman also has a chapbook of short fiction titled Lake House and Other Stories. To read a poem of his that appeared  on the Verse Daily Web site, click here.

Stacey Lynn Brown is an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville.  Her book-length poem Cradle Song, which explores race relations in the South, was published by C&R Press in January 2009.  Poems from Cradle Song have won awards from The Poetry Center of Chicago and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says about the book: “Here's a cycle of poems that feels perfectly timed for our current American moment, as conversations and memories grow more interesting again and we imagine rising up into a better shared story. These are poems that wrap right around you, carrying a reader into a richly textured world of voices and scenes, gritty and cozy memories pressed up side-by-side, in delicious readable resonance.” To read excerpts from Cradle Song, click here.

Allison Benis White teaches at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Self-Portrait with Crayon, a collection of prose poems that won  the 2008 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition. Each poem springs from a painting by French Impressionist Edgar Degas. "An oblique conversation with Degas,” says poet Cole Swenson, “reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces.  White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting." White’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades, among other journals.  To read samples of her work, click here. To read a review of Self-Portrait with Crayon, click here.