Book Release Party at Mac's Backs, 7/27/ 7pm : I Go to the Ruined Place (Philip Metres, Stacey Waite, Carolyne Wright)

Book Release poetry reading:
I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights
Tuesday, July 27th at 7 p.m.
Mac's Backs Paperbacks
1820 Coventry Road, Cleveland Hts, OH 44118
216-321-2665

I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights is an astonishing new anthology featuring the work of a wide range of poets including Li Young Lee, Lois Red Elk, Martha Collins, Farnoosh Moshiri, Tamiko Beyer and Carolyn Forche.

Philip Metres (Cleveland), Stacey Waite (Pittsburgh) and Carolyne Wright (Seattle) will be at Mac's to read their poems and others from the collection.

Philip Metres is the recipient of the 2010 Cleveland Arts Prize for Emerging Artist in Literature. He has published several books including To See the Earth (CSU Press 2008) and edited Come Together Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog Press 2008). He is an active and engaged member of Cleveland's social justice community.

Stacey Waite teaches writing and gender studies at the University of Pittsbugh. She was honored with the Frank O'Hara Prize for Poetry in 2004 for her chapbook Choke.

Carolyne Wright has published numerous books, chapbooks and translations. Her most recent book is A Change of Maps (Lost Horse 2006). She has participated and taught at writing conferences, workshops and festivals throughout the country including Seattle's Bumbershoot, the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival, CSU's Imagination Conference and the Santa Fe Writers Conference.

I Go to the Ruined Place is published by Lost Horse Press and the editors statement is excerpted below:

"We drafted our call loosely: We are increasingly witness to torture, terrorisms and other violations of human rights at unprecedented degrees. What do our instincts tell us and what is our response to these violations? What is our vision of a future wherein human rights are not only respected but expanded?

What we received were both first hand accounts of violation—see prisoner Adrian English’s “Raped Man’s Stream of Consciousness,” or Farnoosh Moshiri’s poem recounting the terror of giving birth in Iran, or Li-Young Lee’s “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees”—and responses from people who feel struck personally by the blows enacted on others: To speak for, to speak as, and to speak against. We were surprised at the range of issues spoken to by the poets. While torture remained a critical topic, as well as issues at stake in the Iraq War, there were also poems that addressed immigrant rights, prisoners’ rights, the Holocaust, the wars in Cambodia, Vietnam, Serbia, South America, Palestine and Israel. We received poems that spoke of suicide bombing, violence against women, the aftermath of 9/11, and outlawing marriage for gay Americans.

We were also moved at the range of experience among the responders: homeless advocates, civil rights workers, clinical social workers, medics, the mentally ill, veterans, humanitarian aid workers, teachers, conscientious objectors, and, of course, many writers who work and fight daily for social justice in their communities. We are particularly proud of the number of Native American poets included in this anthology, something unusual in anthologies of this sort. It seemed to us impossible to collect a group of poems on human rights issues if we didn’t acknowledge the far reaching and often appalling violations that have taken place in our own country."