This recap is authored by contributor Karen Munro.  The Head of the UO Portland Library and a recipient of an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, Karen discusses books, reading, and writing on her wonderful blog Munrovian.

Melissa Sillitoe and the good folks of Show and Tell Gallery hosted another reading last night at Three Friends Coffee House.  The reading series works like this:  Melissa & Co. invite one performer, who might be a poet, fiction writer, musician, or professional plate-spinner.  That person invites two friends to share the stage–and so, a great night is born.

Last night’s Number One Friend was Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic and Like the Life, The World.  Sage invited Kristin Berger and Sara Guest, who is–full disclosure–a friend of mine.  I got the sense the room was full of friends:  usually at poetry readings, people hold their applause until the end.  Last night every poem got clapped for, until Kristin started dropping curtsies to the crowd.

All three readers read poetry tonight.  Up first, Sara kicked it off with a few poems about sex.  Sex in the seventies, sex at house parties, sex as a trade-off for reading an ex-boyfriend’s screenplay.  “I tell him he’s a genius, a madman, and he can’t help but take me to bed because of it.”  (General, knowing laughter.)  She followed up with a series of short poems framed as songs, little odes to the strange and unexpected things that people say.  “Find me something else to believe in. I don’t understand the way the world shoots forward into space,” says a girl to the stars, lying flat on top of her backyard Gymboree.  She closed with “Anecdote of Heat,” a tribute to Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of a Jar.”  “I scarcely know if jar is jar / but heat is heat.”  You can read this and some of Sara’s other poems at Ink Node, here.

Sage read next, breaking out a batch of poems that had never been shared with an audience before.  Her images are vivid and lovely:  a soft-boiled egg’s yolk is “a nimbus of coagulated light.”  The Tower of Pisa “leans as if listening into the arc of its own legend.”  She read a poem she’d written at twenty-five and only recently unearthed, and it was a great, hilarious snapshot of life’s little weirdnesses, ending, “Generally I don’t trust large men / with small dogs / but this guy’s got an ok handshake / so I don’t know.”  Another poem came from a writing prompt, with the unlikely title, “The Problem with Bipolar Penguins.”  (Part of the problem?  Is “the equation of distance divided by desire never to be reached.”)  Sage also did something I wish people would do more often–she busted out another poet’s work.  There’s something wonderful about hearing a poet read the work of a another poet they admire.  Sage read Jack Gilbert’s “Failing and Flying,” and if you can ever hear that poem read aloud by someone who likes and understands it, I highly recommend the experience.

Kristin brought us home, with poems about northern Michigan and life with two small children–about different kinds of wildness, I guess.  She captures the starkness and beauty of the world, as well as its fragility.  Canadian geese are “tar-necked and wise,” while a children’s book is full of the beloved, bewhiskered creatures of the far north–the walrus, the narwhal, the beluga.  All of them, Kristin reminds us, are melting away.  In “Release of the Cabbage Looper Moth,” she links her sleeping six year-old daughter to the transforming moth:  “In the dark, the paper crane mobile taunted in slow swirls. / I pulled the thin quilt up to her chin, covering the tanned, river-smooth chest, / white buttons of her pajama shirt undone and flung, as everything is which I try to tuck at midnight.”  The poem took first prize in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Poet’s Choice award, and you can read it here.

By the end of the evening, it was clear that not only are all three readers linked by friendship, they’re also connected by the Portland writing community, and by the VoiceCatcher anthology project.  VoiceCatcher, a local publishing venture that supports women’s publishing in Portland, sprang originally from the Portland Women Writer’s workshops.  All three readers now serve VoiceCatcher in some editorial capacity, and Kristin commented that if it weren’t for VoiceCatcher–if she hadn’t one day decided to send her work out and see if anyone liked it enough to publish it–she wouldn’t have been on the stage at all.  If that’s not a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is.

You can buy a copy of Kristin’s book For the Willing from Finishing Line Press.  Sage’s books are available from Powell’s.  Find out more about VoiceCatcher here, and grab a copy from local bookstores or your nearest New Seasons Market.  As always, my transcriptions are error-prone, so you should proofread from your very own copy.

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