It’s hard to believe that A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis hit the streets well over a year ago, cresting into 2020. I organized an event in mid February in Bangor with live music, images, readings, refreshments and all that to a packed house.
And then—yup, you saw it coming with that “cresting into 2020”—the pandemic hijacked space and time.
IT’S A FABULOUS (and beautiful) BOOK: with personal essays and poetry and art, with the visual and lit voices of about 100 Maine makers.
One of the coeditors and creators, Kathleen Sullivan, has organized another in-person reading/presentation as part of the SCHOODIC ARTS FESTIVAL:
THIS TUESDAY, 8/3, at 6 p.m. Gouldsboro Town Park—actually in Prospect Harbor, Maine [weather looks good, but rain loc is Hammond Hall].
Live music and poets reading.
I am reading my prose poem/essay, “Skinn(mm)ing in Seven Cycles” from A Dangerous New World. These months and months have not held any live readings, as reader or listener, for me, and so I am looking forward (more than looking forward) to live bodies, real people doing real things like blinking and looking at the sky, scratching their noses, whispering to a neighbor.
The title comes from the fact that in the last 650,000 years there have been 7 cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago.
It starts like this:
“Our waters have all gone on a walk-about. Not of their own volition. Like a stroll. No intention here. What else could they do? We’ve been punching holes in the skin of this rudderless boat since we first formed a fist, made the tool, sharpened the tip. So, just listen up. Before we drown. Or maybe end up starting over, in the beginning when breath and sound and the jazz licks of Anat Cohn, Kamau, Matthew Whittaker (he’s barely started, but fabulous, fragile and fierce, give him a fucking chance, really) are ferreted away into the future of now when mountains of trash and megabillions of gallons of fuel have spewed us into the behind-times. Before keyboards and clarinets, before dancing, before bodies. Pre-Ardipithecus. Again.”
Come if you can. I’d be so happy to see you. My guess is you’d be happy to be live in the world.
Published by Littoral Books
