Saturday, October 23rd, 8pm: Tost & McCollough

Aaron McCollough, reading October 23rd


Two of the most promising and talented young poets of the day, Aaron McCollough & Tony Tost, will read in the Desert City on Saturday, October 23rd, at 8 pm. The reading will be held at Internationalist Books -- 405 E. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Aaron will be joining us from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is currently getting a doctorate in English literature. He is the author of Welkin, Double Venus, and the forthcoming Little Ease. He is also the editor of the poetry journal GutCult. Below are several of his poems.

"Columbia" originally published in Drunken Boat


The family goose
beside the road – a yard of windows – panes all broken out and frames all laid upon an-

other. Long grass and crazy plantain.

If winter comes.
The rain for hours in the wood and greasily on the wood, which goes at a joint:

rail creeping away from rail along an iron dowel.

The road bears hard
around the rise. The grass succeeds from roadside under foot and the goose’s feather

slick to one wide leaf below a rachis and through the cover.

The trees aligned and unaligned – the live-oaks knotted into one – fill with ticks and

resurrection fern.

"The Seventh Poem of Jan Vandermeer" originally published in Drunken Boat


The gusting snow in streetlight swarm of bees
Tonight to all the decaying mantles

Old wobbly world tearing down you make me hate me
You flinging light around your dark flung fill

Love comes up—my heart’s late leach

Come work on me come draw me out to work
For years are coming even absent ones


"Eros, Ethos, Economuos" originally published in Word/For Word

The air is good in here
we say of the pine-tree

and breaking twigs to move
the soul with what we have

to stick against the fact
of empty sky.

Just look! Cardinals
have nested here since fall

as we have come to rest
and raise our young

in a dangerous
and tangible wilderness.

Secrets inside we can't
quite name. Hopes. Shapely wants.

The silhouette of cones,
which don't resemble cones

in silhouette but trees
upended. Dear, we lease

the stem alive and smooth,
though tearing the bark off --

the wet, green, denuded
careen of this not ours

to love.

And here is an essay he wrote on the poet Ronald Johnson which appeared in Octopus #3.

Coming soon: October's second reader, Carrboro's own Tony Tost........





Tony Tost, reading October 23rd