July 5, 2016 5PM Doug Holder Interviews Kathleen Spivack about her new novel Unspeakable Things ( Knoph 2016)

Kathleen Spivack

To view the interview live go to  http://scatvsomerville.org

KATHLEEN SPIVACK is an award-winning writer. She studied with Robert Lowell and remained friends with him for eighteen years, and is the author of many books, among them Moments of Past Happiness, A History of Yearning, and With Robert Lowell and His Circle. She has had residencies at the Radcliffe Institute, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the American Academy in Rome, and has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Commission. She teaches in Boston and Paris.

Unspeakable Things

A novel

By Kathleen Spivack

About the Book:

A wild, erotic novel—a daring debut—from the much-admired, award-winning poet, author of Flying Inland, A History of Yearning, and With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and Others. A strange, haunting novel about survival and love in all its forms; about sexual awakenings and dark secrets; about European refugee intellectuals who have fled Hitler’s armies with their dreams intact and who have come to an elusive new (American) “can do, will do” world they cannot seem to find. A novel steeped in surreal storytelling and beautiful music that transports its half-broken souls—and us—to another realm of the senses. 

The setting: the early 1940s, New York—city of refuge, city of hope, with the specter of a red-hot Europe at war.

At the novel’s center:  Anna (known as the Rat), an exotic Hungarian countess with the face of an angel, beautiful eyes, and a seraphic smile, with a passionate intelligence, an exquisite ugliness, and the power to enchant . . . Her second cousin Herbert, a former minor Austrian civil servant who believes in Esperanto and the international rights of man, wheeling and dealing in New York, powerful in the social sphere yet under the thumb of his wife, Adeline . . . Michael, their missing homosexual son . . . Felix, a German pediatrician who dabbles in genetic engineering, practicing from his Upper East Side office with his little dachshund, Schatzie, by his side . . . The Tolstoi String Quartet, four men and their instruments, who for twenty years lived as one, playing the great concert halls of Europe, escaping to New York with their money sewn into the silk linings of their instrument cases . . .

And watching them all: Herbert’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Maria, who understands from the furtive fear of her mother, and the huddled penury of their lives, and the sense of being in hiding, even in New York, that life is a test of courage and silence, Maria witnessing the family’s strange comings and goings, being regaled at night, when most are asleep, with the intoxicating, thrilling stories of their secret pasts . . . of lives lived in Saint Petersburg . . . of husbands being sent to the front and large, dangerous debts owed to the Tsar of imperial Russia, of late-night visits by coach to the palace of the Romanovs to beg for mercy and avoid execution . . . and at the heart of the stories, told through the long nights with no dawn in sight, the strange, electrifying tale of a pact made in desperation with the private adviser to the Tsar and Tsarina—the mystic faith healer Grigory Rasputin (Russian for “debauched one”), a pact of “companionship” between Anna (the Rat) and the scheming Siberian peasant–turned–holy man, called the Devil by some, the self-proclaimed “only true Christ,” meeting night after night in Rasputin’s apartments, and the spellbinding, unspeakable things done there in the name of penance and pleasure . . .

June 28, 2016 Poet Lori Desrosiers 5PM

Lori Desrosiers

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Lori Desrosiers is the author of The Philosopher’s Daughter, published by Salmon Poetry in 2013 and a chapbook, Inner Sky from Glass Lyre Press. Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak is her second full-length collection. Her poems have appeared in New Millennium Review, Contemporary American Voices, Best Indie Lit New England, String Poet, Blue Fifth Review, Pirene's Fountain, The New Verse News, The Mom Egg, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She edits Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry and WORDPEACE, an online journal dedicated to peace and justice. She teaches Literature and Composition at Westfield State University and Holyoke Community College, and Poetry in the Interdisciplinary Studies program for the Lesley University M.F.A. graduate program.

Blurbs

Lori Desrosiers’ Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak enfolds in an origami of memory the poet’s life and the lives of her family and others.  As with any fine poetry, the poems mostly transcend clock-time, soaring to a Blakean cleansing of the “doors of perception.”  In vignettes alchemized from everyday experiences, the poet gives us an “eternity in an hour” of music-laced memoir.  Here is an immersion in the dance of a woman who shakes off the shackles of domestic oppression; here is a gentle dreamer who embraces the liberation of being a daring writer.  

--Susan Deer Cloud, Author of Hunger Moon

Opening this new book by Lori Desrosiers you will find of memory and search, of second-thoughts and playful indecisions, poems that go back in time to retrieve music and mend heart.

Indeed, the reader will find all kinds of music here: there is a violin that lacks music and there is a brother's voice that speaks like father's--but not when he sings. There is a reveille at 7.15am, and there is a young baby whose voice is known by her singing. And it is music that brings half-deaf father back from the dead. Page after page the reader will come to learn that it is memory--that beautiful, final chord, which reveals us to ourselves, and yet is unwritten by us.


                                            --- Ilya Kaminsky
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June 14, 2016 5PM Sharon Shaloo--Executive Director of the Mass. Center for the Book

Sharon Shaloo

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Sharon Shaloo is the executive director for the Massachusetts Center for the Book, located in Boston. Every year Mass Book presents the Mass. Book Awards that honors writers in the Commonwealth and beyond. A resident of Arlington and member of the town’s Tourism and Economic Development Committee, Shaloo has worked on a literary map of the state, which  includes landmarks from every city and town in the commonwealth. 

Shaloo grew up in New Jersey and earned her undergraduate degree from Rutgers University. She has lived in Indiana, New York City and participated in a teaching exchange in London. When her husband’s career path brought her to the Bay State, she originally moved to Boston, but later chose to settle in Arlington.