Sarah Manguso & Julian Semilian, This Saturday, Nov. 12th, 8pm, Internationalist Books

Please spread far and wide....

Who: Sarah Manguso, author of The Captain Lands in Paradise and the forthcoming Siste Viator; Breadloaf Fellow and Pushcart Prize winner; can simultaneously disassemble a chainsaw and shot-gun a Fanta.

Who: Julian Semilian, author of Transgender Organ Grinder, A Spy in Amnesia, and the forthcoming Osiris with a Trombone Across the Seam of Insubstance; translator of Paul Celan's Romanian Poems and Mircea Carterescu's Nostalgia; film editing instructor at NC School of the Arts; wove a series of decorative doll vests from strands of the world wide web.

What: Desert City Poetry Series, kicking out 2005 with steel-toes and stilleto heels.

When: This Saturday, November 12th, 8pm, 2005.

Where: Internationalist Books, 405 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC, it's a whole new I-books.

How much: $2 donation requested to support the series & the readers.

Why: ""What concerns me now is the drag queen shouting her monologue into the sky / which is not so much "there" as it is visible to the tourists that walk under it" "How we loved you comrade rump! how you grilled us with your copper wires when we lied! How they glittered like penalizing mirrors to better contemplate the likeness of our guilty decadence in! The tar tugging at our hearts now is our guilty love for the quicksand of your elephant thighs, your seams, comrade rump!"

See you there.....

Upcoming readings:

January 14th, 8pm: Ed Roberson & TBA

February 11th, 8pm: Claudia Rankine & TBA


*Internationalist Books

*Sarah Manguso

*Julian Semilian

Contact the DCPS: Ken Rumble, director
rumblek at bellsouth dot net

The Desert City is supported by grants from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Orange County Arts Commission.

"Reverence"
by Sarah Manguso

Love not the rider but the old rider,
the ghost in the saddle: Obey that ghost.
A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip.
But we are not good horses.
We bolt. We stand still in bad weather.
We rely on things we know are unreliable,
it feels so good just to "rely."
We are relied on.
But I do not know who knows that bad secret.
I do not see who sits astride my back,
who cuts my flank so lovingly on our way to the dark mountain.


"ALGAZY & GRUMMER (1)"
by Urmuz
translated by Julian Semilian

Algazy is a pleasant old man, gap toothed and grinny, with sparse and silky beard, neatly placed upon a gridiron screwed under the chin and hedged with barbed wire...

Algazy speaks no European language... But if you wait for him in the dawn of day, at the break of morn, and say to him: “What goez, Algazy!” dwelling on stressing the sound of Z, Algazy grins, and so as to manifest his gratitude, pushes his mitt in his pocket and yanks at the start of a string, prompting his beard to jump for joy an entire quarter of an hour... Unscrewed, the gridiron serves to resolve any quandary, pertinent to the harmony or hygiene of the home...

Algazy never accepts bribes. Once only he lowered himself to this mode of demeanor, when he was a copyist for the Church Notary, and even then he took no cash but only a few crock shards, eager to endow with dowry several of his indigent sisters who were about to become betrothed the very next day...

Algazy's greatest bliss — along with his customary tasks at the store — is to harness himself of his own good will to a wheelbarrow, and tagged at the distance of two meters by his crony Grummer — to hop at a gallop, with the singular ambition of collecting old rags, punctured vegetable oil tins, but notably, knucklebones, which then the two gobble together, after midnight, under the most sinister silence...

Grummer, moreover, sports a beak of scented wood...