Observable Readings
September 6; 8:00 p.m.
Schlafly Bottleworks

For the first page of the 2007-08 Observable Readings series on September 6, poetry promoter and published poet, Aaron Belz, presents two mid-western scribes:  Allison Funk and Tony Trigilio.

Funk, a professor of English and Creative Writing at Southern Ilinois University Edwardsville, has penned three books of poems--The Knot Garden, Living at the Epicenter and Forms of Conversion. Her poems appear in 10 anthologies and are published in literary magazines including Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and Shenandoah.

Signs, from Forms of Conversion, quietly examines grief. In this poem Funk uses the difficulty of physical movement to symbolize the paralysis of loss. Her sparse, tight language expresses pain without unnecessary drama. She simply allows the tension to exist from the gravity of the situation itself.

Tony Trigilio is the Director of Creative Writing-Poetry at Columbia College in Chicago. He is also the editor of Court Green, the poetry journal, and the author of The Lama's English, a book of poetry. His poems have appeared in the New Orleans Review, The Laurel Review, Hotel Amerika and the Denver Quarterly.

In Face on Mars Trigilio likens his mother and father's facial expression to the planet's surface. His words are strongly visual to communicate his family's experience with and exhaustion from life when he writes of the "mute mesas and buttes, a scattering of ruins." The childhood scene that he describes chills us and lingers like the mother's cigarette with its "smoke helix."

 With these two poets readers will learn that the book on emotions never closes.