Baltimore Magazine Names Elizabeth Hazen an Author to Read During Social Distancing
Elizabeth Hazen, author of "Girls Like Us," is named beside Dora Malech and D. Watknins as authors to read during social distancing in a new Baltimore Magazine editorial.
In a new editorial from Baltimore Magazine, Baker award finalist Elizabeth Hazen is named as an author to read "while working from home" (read: social distancing). The magazine puts her name next to other Baltimore stalwarts like the incredible poet Dora Malech and the essayist Kondwani Fidel.
Elizabeth has been hit hard by recent event cancelations due to the COVID19 outbreak. Her events at Normal's Books, Greedy Reads, City Lit, and Kensington have been canceled or postponed.
Her newest book, Girls Like Us (released March 1st), is packed with fierce, eloquent, and deeply intelligent poetry focused on female identity and the contradictory personas women are expected to embody.
Featured Audio: “Letter from Sligo Creek” a poem by Rose Solari
Like the cover photo, the poems in Difficult Weather are timeless and—unlike the poems in many first books—extraordinarily mature. Although the narrative voice is generally that of a young woman in her late twenties and early thirties whose subject matter sometimes ranges back to early childhood, these are poems of adulthood: the discovery and endlessly painful rediscovery of human frailty, sexual and emotional betrayal, bad love in all its familial and romantic varieties, memory, and elegy…
Listen to Grace Cavalieri Interview fmr. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
Grace Cavalieri is known widely for her stirring and empathic poetry, collected in her Legacy work Other Voices, Other Lives, but did you know that she is also an impressive interviewer? On her NPR show, The Poet and The Poem, she interviews significant poets from the US and around the world, with an aim of interpreting their lives through their poetry. In her tenure on the program, she has interviewed 9 US Poets Laureate (you can find a list with these archived interviews HERE), including the incomparable Robert Pinsky.
Featured Poetry: “Toytown” by Grace Cavalieri
The name Other Voices, Other Lives, is not purely poetical, in fact, for Grace Cavalieri it is a mission statement. In her Legacy Book of the same name there are several sections in 3rd person omnipotent which aim to breathe the same air as famous women who have suffered adversity. Tragic figure Anna Nicole Smith, feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Cora from William Carlos William’s Kora in Hell. All in all they are an admix of Grace Cavalieri’s poetic life, all brought together in one beautiful volume; so, perhaps, we might figure that Anna Nicole Smith converses with Mary Wollstonecraft for the very first time in the pages of Other Voices, Other Lives.
Today, from the Anna section we have the heart-rending “Toytown”