September 7, 2024 marked LBP's first foray into a long-distance poet/judge in-person launch. Pittsburgh poetry supporters SHOWED UP for our out-of-town readers <3
Super-special THANKS to all the fantastic folks at White Whale who make every event they host special!
If you weren't able to attend in-person or livestream the event, we missed you! Enjoy these pictures, listen to the recordings of the poets, and catch us next time.
Lee Ann Roripaugh, this year's judge, visited us from North Dakota. They gave an intense and intimate reading, entrancing the audience entirely.. You can listen to them read #to my mother's dementia #kaze no denwa from poets.org. Lee's reading and subsequent introduction of Edith's collection was pitch-perfect.
Edith offered thoughtful and heart-felt remarks to those who have support her writing journey, addressing both those livestreaming and those in the room. Edith read two poems from her collection, Reconstruction. The first, "no softness now," is the longest in the collection. Through formally subversive out-of-sequence lists beginning call and response style stanzas, from these "episodes" the listener soon comes to understand the deep scars cancer has trenched through the lives of the women that populate this poem:
"4. I wake up in a hospital bed alone. Something hard encases my torso from just
above my waist up to my collarbone. For a moment I can’t breathe.
5. A body cast?
6. No. It’s just my ribcage underneath my skin
no softness now between bones and air"
Edith left us with, "Twoness," a love poem as much about the speaker letting love in as it is about the lover, "sometimes I know my body / is the one you want / because I am inside it"
A note from behind the scenes at Lefty Blondie Press:
Edith traveled from California to Pittsburgh, PA for the launch of her first chapbook, Reconstruction. My family and I had the honor of hosting Edith during her stay.. Her first night here we bonded over Mexican food and we all became fast friends with this phenomenal woman. Saturday was an absolute dream as I bound chapbooks while Edith inscribed her preorders. Let's just say we had to keep reminding each other this was real life! Then dinner, THE LAUNCH, and back to my house for a nightcap. Bliss!
Thanks for supporting Lefty Blondie Press! All proceeds from sales go directly back into the press so we can continue to promote the work of self-identifying women and non-binary poets.
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