Monday, May 11 - Stephanie Brown/J.Robert Lennon

Monday at noon on KPFK I'll feature a recording of a reading organized earlier this spring as part of Casa Romantica’s terrific live poetry series in San Clemente. I’ve been proud to feature writers participating in that excellent local arts endeavor, free to the public in person and, again, broadcast via Bibliocracy. Today’s reading of poetry is by Stephanie Brown, author of two volumes, Allegory of the Supermarket and Domestic Interior. She received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. Among other publications, Brown has published in American Poetry Review appearing on multiple issue covers, and won the magazine's Jessica Nobel-Maxwell Award in 1994. Work has appeared in The Best American Poetry and recent anthologies including Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and The Grand Permission: Essays on Poetry and Motherhood. She has worked as a public librarian since 1989 and is currently a Senior Branch Manager for the Orange County Public Library system, and has taught creative writing at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands.

In the poem which opens the reading, “You Get Comfortable and Relax,” Brown’s wry, observant, funny narrator banters with a friend about death. “She said I would like to be wearing a great looking Armani coat, and choose to die like Indians/ You know, a good day to die?/ I think that’s what they said before battle, not suicide. I might not be right about that but you know what I mean.”

At 12:30 KPFK airs a rebroadcast of my interview earlier this year with novelist J.Robert Lennon, one of my favorite writers, on his amazing allegorical book Castle. Ignore the confused review it got recently in the LA Times. This is one remarkable novel.