Kathleen Rooney (Gold Wake Press)
Robinson Alone:A Novel In Poems
Hannah Gamble (Fence Books)
Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast
Join us for a Release party/reading/signing with Kathleen Rooney and her lastest book, Robinson Alone: A Novel in Poems & her friend Hannah Gamble will also read from her soon to bereleased paperback, Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast.
The Nebraska-born poet, painter, critic, and musician Weldon Kees traced
a brief, bright path through midcentury America before vanishing in
1955, an apparent suicide. Among the poems he left behind are a
particularly unsettling four that feature the mysterious Robinson: both a
prototypical member of the smart set masking his desperation with
urbane savoir-faire and an alter ego for the troubled Kees himself.In
ROBINSON ALONE, Kathleen Rooney performs a bold act of literary
mediumship, conjuring Kees through his borrowed character to sketch his
restless journey across locales and milieus New York, San Francisco, the
highways between and to evoke his ambitions, his frustrations, and his
skewed humor.The product of a decade-long engagement with Kees and his
work, this novel in poems is not only a portrait of an under-appreciated
genius and his era, but also a beam flashed into haunted boiler-rooms
that still fire the American spirit, rooms where energy and optimism are
burnt down to ash.
Selected by Bernadette Mayer for the National Poetry Series, these poems
engage the structures of family and intimacy, exposing the viscera of
the everyday, all its frailties and familiarity rendered absurd and
remade through language.