Coming to the UNC University Center, Columbine A.
Free fiction and poetry reading and booksigning. All are welcome.
Wednesday November 2nd, 7 p.m.
Anthonia Kalu
& Jeffrey Ethan Lee
(Actress Alyssa Carpenter will be reading some of the dramatic scenes in the poetry with Jeffrey Lee.)
Lee Bio | Books | Reviews | Some sample poems
this info as a printable legalsize flyer
Anthonia C. Kalu is a Professor of Black Studies at
UNC where she developed the Black Studies program there into an autonomous
department, which was later renamed Africana Studies. She has been teaching
at UNC since 1989. She received her doctoral degree in African Languages
and Literature with a minor in Afro-American Literature from the University
of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984. Among her awards are a Ford Foundation
postdoctoral fellowship, a Rockefeller writer-in-residence fellowship
and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship for teachers.
She spent a year at Connecticut College, where as a Distinguished Associate
Professor she helped define their program in Africana Studies. She has
also received Distinguished Scholar awards from the University of Notre
Dame, Indiana and Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Kalu is a member
of the African Studies Association and the African Literature Association.
She serves on the editorial board of several academic journals. Her
research interests include African and African American literatures
and literary theory construction, Women in the African Diaspora, African
development issues and Multiculturalism. Her publications include articles
in journals like Africa Today, Research in African Literatures,
African Studies Review, the Atlantic Literary Review, Seminar and
the Literary Griot. She is editor of the Rienner Anthology
of African Literature (forthcoming: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Fall
2004).
BOOKS BY KALU
Women, Literature and Development in Africa, Africa World Press,
2001.
Broken Lives and Other Stories, Ohio University Press, 2003.
A Review of Kalu's Broken Lives and Other Stories may be found in America Magazine at:
http://www.americamagazine.org/BookReview.cfm?articletypeid=31&textID=3434&issueID=473
Lee's first full-length poetry book, invisible sister,
was published by Many Mountains Moving Press (2004). Lee won the 2002
Sow's Ear Poetry Chapbook competition for The Sylf (published
2003), published Strangers in a Homeland (chapbook with Ashland
Press, 2001), and won the first Tupelo Press Prize for literary fiction
in 2001. He also created identity papers, 2002, a full-length
dramatic poem with music on CD, available from www.drimala.com.
He has published hundreds of poems, stories and essays in Many Mountains
Moving, Xconnect, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Crosscurrents, Drexel
Online Journal, Green Mountain Review, Washington Square, American Poetry
Review, etc. He teaches creative writing and literature at UNC.
invisible sister (Many Mountains Moving Press, 2004).
The Sylf (Sow's Ear Poetry Press, 2003).
identity papers (Drimala Records, 2002).
Polyphony Magazine (September 2004)
Rain Taxi Review of Books Summer 2005 online edition or http://www.raintaxi.com
North American Review (May-August 2005, Vol. 290, Nos. 3-4) in Synecdoche: Brief Poetry Reviews, 84.
"sex ed blues" can be found in XConnect at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect/v5/i3/g/contents.html
"towards euphoria" can be found in Unpleasant Event Schedule at http://unpleasanteventschedule.com/JeffreyEthanLee.htm
"her blues" can be found in Painted Bride Quarterly at http://www.pbq.rutgers.edu/issues/68/content/JeffreyEthanLee.htm
"Iris’ painter hears the rain music return (off broadway)" and "Iris’ blues for her painter" can be found in XConnect at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect/i21/g/contents.html
Review by Thaddeus Rutkowski for Small Press Review, published by Dustbooks, P.O. Box 100, Paradise, CA 95967, [http://www.dustbooks.com/sprinfo.htm]
invisible sister
By Jeffrey Ethan Lee
2004; Many Mountains Moving Press,
420 22nd Street, Boulder, CO 80302.
$11.95
In his poetry, Jeffrey Ethan Lee gives order to a series of instinctive associations through a conscious command of language. By this method, he creates a pointillist picture of American life as lived by someone who is not an ordinary American.
In the first part of invisible sister, called “Prologues,” Lee offers a graceful account of thorny childhood experience, beginning with a tour of an elementary school. Here, we are reminded of behavior that too often is ignored or kept hidden: cruelty to animals, meanness toward sexually aware girls, mockery of short people. Yet, the speaker finds someone he can communicate with, even appreciate:
the 2nd grade girl only I would like
because I couldn’t see her “cooties,”
and she couldn’t see my colorAs the prologues come to a close, the speaker travels through a dream of debasement (at the hands of a cop), eventually rising Dante-like to a sort of peak, where he (the speaker) experiences a vision of pure light, a feeling of euphoria, an image of paradise.
The second part of the book consists of the long poem “invisible sister.” This is the heart of the work, and while it is challenging in its complexity, it will reward any reader who has ever struggled for communion with another person. Several segments are written in a form that Lee calls the “dialogic lyric”--essentially a conversational verse form. The two sides of the conversation are placed next to each other on the page, so it is possible to read one statement at a time, or to read across both statements to arrive at a new, mingled speech. The effect is eerie, yet powerful:[his side] [her side]
she wanted to be of the race –this poisoned place
of beauty I know it’s
as though beauty itself could be heaven to him—
a raceless race but what ifLike the first part, the second ends in an upward movement, but this time the action is more earthly. And the focus has shifted to the invisible sister herself, who emerges from her own journey reborn, without shame, with an “ember light” in her eyes.
The Art of the Invisible
...the title poem [is] a tour de force of persona and plot as a brother watches his sister careen out of control. “invisible sister” does indeed set up a dialogue of great tension—its sprawling formal voices and the dual (and dueling) columns challenge the notion of Asians as an “invisible” minority. Iris, the invisible sister, serves not only as witness to her own experience but becomes a sort of every-girl when she is coaxed into a barn by her white friend....
The book is full of dualities: life/death, dream life/waking life, female/male, Asian/non-Asian. Poem parts... are repeated and recast. A poem fragment appears as one voice and is immediately consumed and duplicated into a poem fragment with two voices. invisible sister itself suggests multiple readings and serves not only as a book of poetry but as a blueprint, sheet music, a play waiting to be built or performed. In this way, Jeffrey Ethan Lee has done a great service to performance poetry. His careful line breaks, as well as his deft use of white space and text, suggest a deliberate and thoughtful architecture that belies a common complaint that so much of performance poetry does not hold up on the page.
The voice of the brother in this poem is in service to the sister’s—Iris is the one with the story to tell; she is the one with the drama. And yet the quiet dignity of the male voice holds his own even when:
I was so lost in her
my I.D. cards could have been
waterfalling around me....[T]here is much to be admired in all of Jeffrey Ethan Lee’s poetic personas and voices....
—Denise Duhamel