 |
Laura Read, 2011 Winner of the AWP
Donald Hall Prize in Poetry |
I
sat down recently at Madeleine's Cafe in Spokane, Washington with
writer and fellow teacher Laura Read to discuss her new book of
poetry, Instructions
for My Mother's Funeral,
which won the 2011 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and was a finalist
in the 2011 May Swenson Poetry Award. Her first book, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You,
won the 2010 Chapbook Award held by Floating Bridge Press.
Read is an active member of the Spokane writing scene, co-running with
poet Maya Jewell Zeller the monthly Beacon Hill Reading Series at
Spokane Community College and co-advising with poet Connie Wasem Scott the student literary
journal WireHarp at
Spokane Falls Community College.
Read
participated as a panelist in last year's GetLit!, a Spokane-wide literary festival, and has read her work with other well-known and local poets at
Auntie's Bookstore.
As
part of the AWP award, Instructions
for My Mother's Funeral
will be published in late 2012 by University of Pittsburgh Press.
Judge and poet Dorianne Laux, and one of Read's deepest inspirations,
had this to say about the book:
Like
the title poem, Instructions for My Mother's Funeral
is a mapping of absences and, in returning to where each absence
began—or what best symbolizes the absence, Read recreates the past
into the present. Explanations to questions of why occur, but not
all explanations serve and many questions still remain, such as what
is it for a father's death to cause a house to be sold and strangers
to live in it, and what is it to live in a house where he never
lived.
Just
as the title poem directs the listener not to go back to the mother's
birthplace because it's all gone—all the buildings that were
important, all that made who she is exists only in memory—by
imagining the return, the identity is created through the path of
return:
[.
. .] If
I go back, I won’t find her—
they
took the town down
like
the Heath Library
across
the street from St. Aloysius
where
I read the World Book Encyclopedia
for
my ornithology report—
I
had to tell the story of 30 birds,
where
they lived, what they ate,
how
you can spot them up in the branches
and
tell them one from the other. [. . .]
Sometimes
the path of returning is linear as is the overall organization of the book; however,
the return to memory resists the linear movement and causes a stylistic tension that is
