Julia Kasdorf

 

Poetry Reading
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
5 p.m., Bucknell Hall

 

Julia Spicher Kasdorf has published two collections of poetry with the University of Pittsburgh Press, and a third, Poetry in America, is forthcoming in August. Of the other collections, Eve's Striptease was named one of Library Journal's Top 20 Best Poetry Books of 1998, and Sleeping Preacher won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes College's Association Award for New Writing. Her poems have been awarded a 2009 NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She also published a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, winner of the 2002 Book of the Year Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and a monograph, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American. She has worked on new editions of Yoder's 1940 local color classic Rosanna of the Amish and Fred Lewis Pattee's The House of the Black Ring. With Michael Tyrell she co-edited the anthology, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn. An associate professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University, she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.

Davis will share the reading with Todd Davis.


 

 

Julia Kasdorf

Mother with Toddler in War Time

 

The first soft day after

an intractable winter

 

                   a child, conceived before

                   the towers burned

 

but born after, commands

a flock of geese:  

 

                   Do this! Do this! 

                   as her arms flap  

 

under their scraping songs.

How would things shift if

 

                   we could say that nothing

                   on our worn earth matters

 

more than this gesture

this instant, this lifting?