Tag Archives: Oana Avasilichioaei

Photos: Oana Avasilichioaei and Camille Martin at Argo Bookshop, Montreal (Bonus: Zen Snowcat)

          Despite a freak mid-spring snowstorm, diehard Montreal poetry lovers trudged over to Argo Bookshop to hear Oana Avasilichioaei and me read from our recently-released collections: Oana from We, Beasts and me from Looms.
          Below are some photos from the reading, which was watched over by muses Kerouac and Whitman.
          There’s also a photo of Zen Snowcat, which I sculpted in my hotel room and promised to send any who braved the snowdrifts to attend. Zen Snowcat says: “Each snowflake falls in the right place.” No complaints.
          Many thanks to Jean-Pierre Karwacki of Argo Bookshop for hosting the reading and to Erin Moure for the photographs of me in the slideshow below.
          And for any Montrealers unable to attend the reading, We, Beasts and Looms are both available for purchase at Argo Bookshop.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.


Camille Martin

We, Beasts by Oana Avasilichioaei: A pre-reading sampler

On Tuesday, March 19, I’ll be reading with Oana Avasilichioaei at Montreal’s Argo Bookshop. The event will celebrate our respective poetry collections published in 2012: Oana’s We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn) and my Looms (Shearsman Books). If you’re in Montreal on March 19, please join us.

Wolsak & Wynn, 2012

Wolsak & Wynn, 2012

I’ve been happily engrossed in Oana’s We, Beasts and offer here a sample prior to our reading. The poems in this collection, inspired by fairy tales and fables, have a luminous quality, despite the darkness at their core.

*
where the old road curls into pale blue sky
where rock and pine distill a blurred horizon
backs bend and are divided into valleys

glorified in a field of flags
the Tyrant marches in tight ranks
spells out MOTHER, DIGNITY, FORCE

the story goes like this:
(                                        )
(                                        )
(                                        )
only a hungry ear, a mouth
law speaks in quivers, whips

line by line months break
(here is no child’s game)
incessant in smiles the Tyrant governs
a fist of furrows, knobbed, arthritic

*

No Song

—No peasants, no sepulchres, no bones. A tower, open-mouthed, with no one above its crater.
—No soil that speaks of living, no deity that trains the dying.
—Ruins of a luxury hotel wither two hundred years in the fields. Such is a hospitality of vestiges. Such is finesse. The lastingness.
—Fearful of fevers, no one enters.
—In such peasantless fields, wounds gape uninhabited.

ARGO BOOKSHOP


Camille Martin