[APPLAUSE]
Born in Croatia, Ana Bozicevic emigrated to New York in 1997.
She works at the Center for the Humanities
of the Graduate Center CUNY.
With Amy King, Ana curates The Stain of Poetry reading series
in Brooklyn and is co-editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic,
forthcoming from Factory School.
Ana's full full-length book, Stars of the Night Commute,
was published by Tarpaulin Sky in 2009.
Emoticons and screen names, curse words,
yawn, blah, blah, shmah, vague holy man speech, this book
includes it all.
Bozicevic's is not a poetry enamored of the archaic.
Following in O'Hara's footsteps, it
challenges us to place the stuff of daily life
under the adjective poetic.
But daily life for Bozicevic includes many things,
painful and beautiful, that the rest of us might miss.
We have the rare opportunity to be guided tonight
by this sharp poetic mind on a journey that
will woo and surprise us.
Here's an excerpt from the section The Long Commute.
"Oh the question.
You travel?
We could say, swallows have found their throats again.
You sleep in an open window.
At the Earth's center, a certain someone
discovers then forgets the function of arms on a clock.
You?"
But the way this poem is laid out on the page
allows the eyes to pull from fragments.
The flitting eye might read this.
Oh the question.
You travel?
On a clock.
You?
Allow me this reading.
You travel on a clock.
In the following seconds and minutes,
let's forget what is supposed to happen
and how we're supposed to feel about it.
Let's travel through space and time by on a clock.
Please help me in welcoming Ana Bozicevic.