Pittsburgh Lit Events May 24 - May 30

Prosody

91.3 WYEP Radio

WEAVE FEATURED EVENT:
Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

Tuesday, May 26 @ 8:00pm

Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series, held every Tuesday evening
in the back of Hemingway's Cafe in Oakland, welcomes area writers
Timons Esaias, Romella Kitchens, Arlene Weiner, and Michelle Stoner,
whose poem "Wrinkle" appears in Weave Issue 2.

Hemingway’s Cafe

3911 Forbes Ave Pittsburgh, PA (Oakland)

free – (412)621-4100

The Living Word Project: the break/s, a mixtape for the stage
Wednesday, May 27 & Thursday, May 28 @ 8:00pm
Poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s the break/s delivers a living history of the hip-hop generation through a multimedia-enhanced performance.
August Wilson Center for African American Culture
980 Liberty Ave Pittsburgh, PA (Downtown)
$25 Wed; $30 Thu - (412)456-6666



POP UP! Pittsburgh
Saturday, May 30 @ 3:00pm
The Gist Street Reading Series, in conjunction with POP UP! Pittsburgh,
presents poet Terrance Hayes & fiction writer Cathy Day. There will be
sign language interpreters and hard copies of the work available.
Pittsburgh Association of the Deaf
1854 Forbes Ave Pittsburgh, PA (Uptown)
free

Lucille Seibert
Saturday, May 30 @ 3:15pm
Area poet Lucille Seibert reads her work.
Church of the Ascension
4729 Ellsworth Ave Pittsburgh, PA (Oakland)
free

Do you have a literary event you want to see listed on our calendar?

E-mail details to: joel.weavezine@gmail.com

Weave Reminders

Just a quick reminder to everyone that our submission period for issue 02 will be closing at the end of the day Saturday, January 31st. We plan on having a small hiatus while make decisions about the final contributors and we prepare for our trip to the AWP Conference in Chicago this February.

We hope that if you are going to the AWP that you'll stop by our book fair table to meet the Weave editors and to pick up a copy of issue 01 in person. We are please to announce that we will have Pittsburgh's own Michelle Stoner available at noon on Saturday, February 14 at Weave's table to sign copies of her book Flats and Riots. We also plan on having some neat swag to give away along with a raffle for some writing essentials.

We also want to say good luck to the Pittsburgh Steelers this Sunday at the Superbowl! Let's get one for the other thumb guys!

Review: Flats and Riots by Michelle Stoner

Michelle Stoner’s first book Flats and Riots is a provocative journey that is both political and personal. A quick flip through the pages of this book and you’ll see that Stoner is most comfortable with a brief style, with most poems averaging less than ten lines. But it is her brevity that makes each poem so hearty; each word, phrase and line break is carefully crafted so the reader follows her through both the “flat” and the “depth” of each poem.

Each of the four sections includes snapshots of emotional experiences, wandering travel, and portraits of characters the narrator meets along the way. In the first section, Provocation, you get a feel of wanderlust, a fascination with movement and a curiosity of the role of a world traveler. In this section, an untitled poem showcases these themes through Stoner’s economy of language:

You whistle,
you eat fruit,
you go West, you try.

Stoner’s work also serves as political, both as a whole and as a more focused effort in certain poems. Throughout the book, the reader experiences the narrators growing desire for movement, both physically and socially. She often expresses the narrator’s frustration with seemingly fruitless attempts to use art for political and social change. This frustration is best showcased when Stoner comments on American culture. In her third section, Polimerica, Stoner’s words are a brief but biting commentary on Americans, like the line in her poem “Dirty Face”

dig at it
until it is just red and swollen and
empty, like an American.

This bubbling momentum builds to the fourth and final section called The Flagstaff Poems, written during Stoner’s experiences while living in Arizona. This focus does not signify a settling in the emotion or limit her subject matter but continues to build on her themes to demonstrate that the personal is political, that artistic expression can be activism. In the poem “Going for ice cream in an Arizona winter with the boys” Stoner comments on poverty,

We blew through the cop-proclaimed “crack” hoods;
ain’t no ghetto here

and also on the lifestyle choices of modern women;

“You live with these two guys?”
I sure do.

Flats and Riots is a powerful and moving book of people, places and things. Whether commenting on sexual politics or expressing homesickness, Michelle Stoner’s Flats and Riots delivers an emotional (and sometimes physical) punch-in-the-gut that will make you laugh, cry and think all at once.



Flats and Riots by Michelle Stoner was published by CustomWords in 2008 and can be purchased via their website.