Tony Renner Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, March 28

Tony Renner will be one of the featured readers at the penultimate Chance Operation reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, March 28. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is FREE.

Also featured will be Matthew Freeman and Catherine Rankovic.

Tony Renner is a late bloomer. He returned to writing poetry in 2009 when, after he ran out of the poems he had written as a high school student in 1978 to post on a blog, he began writing new poems so that he could post a poem-a-day for National Poetry Month. He has been published in Bad Shoe, A Handful of Stones, and Troubadour 21.

On the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

"The President's been shot," he said seriously.
We heard about it; it was what we talked about.
Brains and blood and bones in an upward curve
And his body across the woman: that's what we imagined
Though we'd be proven wrong by slow motion film
Showing his body just as if we were there with him.
But we didn't stop looking; we haven't stopped yet.

-- Tony Renner

Matthew Freeman Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, March 28

Matthew Freeman will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, March 28.

Also featured will be Catherine Rankovic and Tony Renner.

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

Matthew Freeman woke up and found he was falling when as a teenager his football coach got him into Dylan Thomas and a dear girl friend introduced him to the romantics. So began a wild journey which would leave him expelled from school and committed to an asylum, and diagnosed with schizophrenia. After bouncing in and out of hospitals and drunk tanks he finally began his recovery. He has had four books published and has graduated from Saint Louis University, where he was awarded the Montesi prize, and is now an MFA student at the University of Missouri St. Louis, where he was awarded the Graduate Prize in poetry.

Critics have high praise for Freeman’s poetry:

“Gritty and real, full of personality (and personalities), urban St. Louis scenery and experience.” —- J. Gordon, Nightimes.com

“Simultaneously hip, funny, and sad.” -— Dorothea Grossman, Poet

“A microscope into the world of an extraordinarily talented schizophrenic.” —- Suzanne Shenkman.

Lake Woeishere

When I hear Garrison Keilor talk about Lutherans
in that light comedic kitsch
on pusillanimous public radio
amid the seemingly knowing chuckles
of fat farts in the audience—
oh my lord can you imagine someone
taking a date there?—I myself
don’t laugh but get very angry
because this guy doesn’t know anything at all
about Martin Luther or Lutherans.

You’re not a real Lutheran until
you’ve walked on your knees up the stairs of a monastery
flagellating yourself with a bitter whip
on each step ten times
over guilt at having glimpsed
the subtle bare momentary wrist
of a heavily-clothed maiden
in a congregation of stone Catholics.

-- Matthew Freeman

Catherine Rankovic Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, March 28

Catherine Rankovic will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, March 28 for the penultimate Chance Operations reading.

Also featured will be Matthew Freeman and Tony Renner.

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

Catherine Rankovic is the author of five books including Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis, Fierce Consent and Other Poems, and the new chapbook Hide and Sex, her first poetry collection in ten years. Catherine has an M.A. from Syracuse University and an M.F.A. from Washington University and has taught poetry and creative nonfiction writing in St. Louis since 1989, currently in the online M.F.A. program at Lindenwood University. Her essays and poems have appeared in December, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Boulevard, River Styx, Umbrella, The Progressive, Natural Bridge, Gulf Coast, other journals, and four anthologies.

Micropenis

I pretended not to notice.
It wasn’t a lot to work with.
We worked with it insofar
And with energy and compensatory strategies
Already in his repertoire.
We worked the sheets off the bed.
Near checkout time when he wouldn’t be offended
I said, “This is Klaus. He was made in Germany.
This is Buzz. This is Skippy the Second,
And this is The Bunny. He was very expensive.”
He said, “Do you have a preference?”
I should have said right then
"Let's go out for fried catfish" and ended this.

-- Catherine Rankovic