Heather Derr-Smith Reads at MUM Library December 1st

Heather Derr-Smith, who earlier made an appearance on Irving Toast, will be reading at the MUM Library, north lounge, on Tuesday, December 1st at 8:00 pm. This will be Heather's last state-side reading before her trip to Bosnia.

Heather Derr-Smith will be reading from The Bride Minaret and Each End of the World as well as from her latest work, in four cities in Bosnia in the following venues: International Universityof Sarajevo, Sarajevo Institute of Science and Technology, Buy Book, Corner Book, the British Council, University of Travnik, University of Zenica, and University of Tuzla, December 3-9th. Check back in for full schedule dates and times! The Readings and Workshops are funded by the Iowa Arts Council, TheNational Endowment for the Arts, and a grant from Iowa State University.

The Bride Minaret is a book of emotional, literary, and cultural substance. As Mandelson wrote of Auden: the poems bear witness to the close connection between intelligence and love. The same can be said of Derr-Smith, whose work is global, with settings in Iraq, British Columbia, Algiers, Paris, Sarajevo, Cairo, the West Bank, and various U.S. locations. Her poems are intercultural, expansive while still grounded in the evocative complexities of motherhood, childhood, and faith. The Bride Minaret is a wonderfully intense collection.
--Denise Duhamel

In the Bride Minaret, Heather Derr-Smith explores the complex and difficult realities of our global world more comprehensively and comprehendingly than most American poets consider even attempting. Often paying close attention to those displaced and/or disconnected from the society around them--Arabs in Europe, Americans in the Middle East, Mennonites in Iowa, Balkan refugees, Roma orphans, Palestinians, and at the heart of the book, a mother now dislocated from her former, childless self--these poems ultimately argue that dislocation is itself a kind of location, just as living forever in one place can end up dislocating oneself from the realities of our time.
--Wayne Miller

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This Sunday/Monday on Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost: Diane Frank

Diane Frank is an award-winning poet and author of five books of poems, including Entering the Word Temple and The Winter Life of Shooting Stars. Her friends describe her as a harem of seven women in one very small body. She lives in San Francisco – where she dances, plays cello, and creates her life as an art form. Diane teaches at San Francisco State University, leads workshops for young writers as a Poet in the School, and directs the Blue Light Press On-line Poetry Workshop. She is also a documentary scriptwriter with expertise in Eastern and sacred art. Blackberries in the Dream House, her first novel, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Blackberries in the Dream House Sample chapters About this book Book tour Reviews Press release "What would happen to us if we were to undertake the discipline of turning our life entirely and self-consciously, into a poem? Through Yukiko, who becomes both a contemplative Buddhist and a geisha skilled in the refinements of sensuous pleasure, Diane Frank allows us to live within the soul of a young woman who has undertaken to create a life imagined and expressed as a poem, in every moment, waking and sleeping, making love or meditating. With its power of language, Blackberries in the Dream House will seduce many readers into considering whether a prosaic life is the only choice we have." —Pierre DeLattre Pierre DeLattre is author of Walking on Air and Tales of a Dalai Lama To Order: Blackberries in the Dream House Books are in stock at 21st Century Bookstore: 800-593-2665 Or, order at your favorite bookstore using the book code: ISBN 1-887472-68-1

Diane Frank GeishaPoet@aol.com Featured Poem Iowa Omen Three hawks fly south as your voice trembles across the great plains. Fields of sleeping cows a gentleness in the land. Here is the omen: Sky splashed with aurora, blue stars, curtains of light. The letters are gold on red silk – Japanese calligraphy. If I had the right kind of ink I’d write them on your skin. — Diane Frank

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