[New-Poetry] Kaya Oakes Telegraph reading Berkeley May 15th

[David Baratier]

Kaya Oakes will be reading at Pegasus Books in downtown Berkeley CA on Tuesday, May 15th at 7:30 pm 
   
  Kaya Oakes' work has appeared in Conduit, Volt, MiPoesias, Coconut, Shampoo, and many other journals. The recipient of awards and grants from the Academy of American Poets and the Bay Area Writing Project, she is also the senior editor of Kitchen Sink Magazine, and she teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

   
  PEGASUS BOOKS DOWNTOWN
2349 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704
510.649.1320
   
   
    TELEGRAPH by Kaya Oakes
  ISBN: 978-1-886350-43-4
  Winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Prize (editor's choice, 2006) 
  80 pages, 6 by 9, $14
  
Her book can be ordered here http://pavementsaw.org/books/telegraph.htm
   
  First books often offer versions of resurrection and Kaya Oakes' moving debut in TELEGRAPH charts a coming back to life with uncompromising lucidity and sorrow. In poetry rife with a bodily knowledge of the inherent “second-ness” of women’s history, Oakes writes for the one and the many, Elektra her guide in the passage. “I wonder if this earth meant anything when I leant my form to it,” the personae wonders in the final poem, and wonderfully, readers will find that it does, thanks to the earnest care of Kaya Oakes' making.
--Claudia Keelan
   
   
  ---------------------------------------
   
  Elektra in the offices
  
   
  Barefoot and ripe with new embarrassment
  Elektra walks up three floors, trying not to sweat
   
  
  Constriction in her thighs, those red bands drawn tight
  and everyone who waited without knowing her was blind
  would receive her in a spotless blackness reserved 
  for those who have forgotten seeing means we learned to feel
  in blindness, too. 
   
  
  You ought to have gone with her, years ago.
  That was when it was easier to feel through things
  by pulling those last strands of someone’s hair
   
  
  and wrapping up your fingers with them, like a tourniquet. 
  Elektra cuts her hair in bathrooms where her shape is strange 
  where the windows stay shut, even on the hottest nights 
  nail scissors in half-drunk bathrooms where she doesn’t live.
   
  
  While shots go off outside, the scissors scrape and pull.
  She climbs the stairs climbed so many times before. 
  She has no one on her side, 
   
  
  she has handwriting and flowers gathered 
  in a backyard where her scalp burned pink
  while the afternoons fed anorexic evenings 
  and the day’s fluorescence never dimmed; 
   
  
  unsure, unripe, unready. Still the pounding rocks her steps
  as innocents file past her. One hand, one knife, 
  one brother burning somewhere in the city,
  The man is upstairs, working,
  or failing at his work and practicing his oaths. 
  But nothing stops the inevitable click
  of the door that yields to business. 
  



Be well

David Baratier, Editor

Pavement Saw Press
PO Box 6291
Columbus, OH 43206
http://pavementsaw.org
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