Sally Van Doren Featured Reader at Duff's on Monday, January 30

Sally Van Doren will be one of three featured readers at the next •chance operations• reading at Duff's, 392 N. Euclid, will be Monday, January 30.

The other featured readers will be George Stair and Jennifer Kronovet.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is $3.

Musical entertainment provided by Tom Bramer, formerly of Radio Iodine, who says:

Just me, my guitar, and a truck-load of computers, effects processors, and other assorted gear. Most of it will be improvised, because I'm generally too lazy to go to the trouble to rehearse anything.

Advance sign-up for the open-mic following the featured readers is encouraged. Click here to sign-up via e-mail.

Sally Van Doren’s book, Sex at Noon Taxes, (LSU Press 2008) won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her next collection, Possessive, is forthcoming from LSU Press in fall 2012. Her poem, “Preposition,” is featured as an animated film in the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere. Excerpts from her epic poem, “The Sense Series” were the text for a multi-media performance at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. A graduate of Princeton University (BA) and University of Missouri-St. Louis (MFA), she has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and in the St. Louis Public Schools and curates the Sunday Poetry Series for the St. Louis Poetry Center.

Cartographer

I thought my authority was
autonomous, but that

abracadabra episode threw me
flat-backed into nowheresville.

I took a stark antiseptic and
mapped out a new impasse.

I went from East coast to West
then found you with my compass

here in the middle. Bless you
and your nobility. You always

know where I am. I’ll pin you
up on my wall and worship

the whole plot of you, my long-
lost space goddess, atlas angel.

-- Sally Van Doren

[Note: This poem has previously appeared in Storyscape Literary Journal.]