Thursday August 7
7:00 at Blue Hill Public Library

5 Parker Point Road
Blue Hill, Maine 04614

co-sponsored by Blue Hill Public Library

in conversation with Beatrix Gates

 

In bold tribute with a title utilizing the last two words Emily Dickinson wrote, Rosa Lane’s Called Back converses with one of our greatest poets in theatrical monologue–decoding secrets amid the blatant. Evoked by epigraphs selected from Dickinson’s work, Lane’s poems, through her I-speaker, reveal the extraordinary to be found in the ordinary and speak to the struggle of sexual orientation, otherness, and the challenges of living in a Calvinistic socioreligious world of oughts and noughts as evidenced in Dickinson’s poems. From sapphic eroticism and subsequent pangs of nonbelonging to tacking next life as a welcome reprieve, poems in Called Back create a de novo dot-connecting lyrical narrative.

 

 

Rosa Lane, poet and architect, is author of four poetry collections, including Chouteau’s Chalk, Tiller North, and Roots and Reckonings. Her work won the 2018 William Matthews Poetry Prize and a Maine Literary Award and is forthcoming or has appeared in the Asheville Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Five Points, Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, RHINO Poetry, River Heron Review, Southampton Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and a PhD in sustainable architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. She splits her time between her native home in coastal Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area where she lives with her wife.

 

Beatrix Gates is a poet, an essayist, a librettist, and a translator. She is the author of The Burning Key, New & Selected Poems (1973–2023) (Thera Books, 2023); Dos (Finishing Line, 2014); In the Open (Painted Leaf, 1998), a Lambda Poetry Award finalist; and the letterpress chapbook desire lines (Artifact Press, 2020). She received fellowships from MacDowell, Millay Arts, Monson Arts, Ucross, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Huntington Library. She received a Maine Arts Commission Poetry Award. Her poems have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cable Street, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Sinister Wisdom, The Kenyon Review, and Tupelo Quarterly and anthologized in Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (St. Martin’s,1988), The World in Us: Lesbian & Gay Poetry of the Next Wave (St. Martin’s, 2000), and Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1995). Gates is also the editor of The Wild Good: Lesbian Photographs & Writings on Love (Anchor, 1996). She earned an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College and a BA at Antioch College. She grew up in Boston and lives in Maine.