Alessandra
Lynch was raised North of New York City. She holds a BA from
Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers's
Workshop. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Hayden's
Ferry Review, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, and other journals. Currently,
she teaches creative writing and English to high school students. She
lives a few steps from a stone library and down the street from the train.
Sails
the Wind Left Behind
In
her first collection, Alessandra Lynch deftly combines the surreal and
the lyric into a striking and confident whole. At times witty, at times
dreamlike, the poems revel in dense Symbolist-like imagery, juxtaposition,
wordplay and rhyme. By refusing a certain kind of transparency--direct
statement and traditional allusion--Lynch excavates the shadowy region
of the psyche. From a rich profusion of images emerge themes of unrealized
desire, and the ways in which we may fail to be present in our own lives
or to others. The poems seek to resolve these themes, suggesting how words,
in memorializing the disorientations of life, reorient us; that it is
in the tokens and monuments of our failed desires, broken promises--"Sails
the wind left behind"--that we are able to find ourselves.
author photo by Gillian Quandt
Born
in New Jersey, Tom Thompson has degrees
from Dartmouth College, the University of Sussex (UK), and the University
of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poems and reviews appear in journals including
American Letters & Commentary, Antioch Review, Boston Review, Colorado
Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Indiana Review, Pleaides, and others.
His first book, Live Feed, was awarded a grant from the Greenwall
fund of the Academy of American Poets. He has taught literature at Dartmouth
College and the University of Iowa and creative writing through the Geraldine
R. Dodge Foundation in New Jersey high schools. Co-founder of the Alberta
duPont Bonsal Foundation for emerging women poets and visual artists,
he is currently vice president of an advertising agency in New York City,
where he lives with his wife, the poet Miranda Field, and their sons William
and Finnian.
Live
Feed
Live Feed examines how we live our lives on-screen. We are conscious
of our performance in ways that people in Shakespeare's time could not
have been, before "reality TV," web cams, and nightly tabloid news blurred
beyond recall distinctions between the real and the imaginary or performed-before
anyone could become an instant, world-wide celebrity-anyone's life instantly
fodder for television or movies at the media's whim, chewed up and spit
out, our lives bought by commercials meant to sell us something. In these
poems the commerce machine often assumes the persona of "the city," a
place where the speaker seeks an accomodation between urbanicity and organicity,
attempting to make some sort of whole of our fractured society, sensibilities
and lives. Fracture is everywhere evident in Live Feed, most obviously
in the form of many of the poems, which are literally fractured down the
center, yet made whole by their insistent lyricism and beauty.
author photo by Miranda Field
Suggested Donation: $5 ($3 for members)
The readings at the HVWC are made possible in part by a grant from the Bydale Foundation; with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and by Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government, corporations and individuals.