Saturday, June 20, 2009

The District of Columbia welcomes Lorna

Paul Martínez Pompa & Lorna Dee Cervantes
@ Moe's Books


"The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry ON TOUR" has two installments left: one on September 23, 2009 in Kansas City, MO, and the grand finale on October 29, 2009 in New York City. When it's all said and done, though, it may be that the stop that meant the most was the one that took place where it all began for me, where poetry is concerned: Berkeley, CA.

It was easily the reading where I knew the most people in the audience, including a former high school teacher, siblings, fellow Bay Area-based poet-friends, and Lorna Dee Cervantes. It touched us all to no end that she made the track across the bay from San Francisco to offer her support, in the flesh, to the Wind Shift poets that evening. At was after this reading that Lorna graciously agreed to support Paul Martinez Pompa's forthcoming Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize-winning book.

I'll get a chance to thank her personally this Sunday, when she reads in Washington DC at the Sunday Kind of Love series at Busboys & Poets.

Advance praise for My Kill Adore Him:


Paul Martínez Pompa deconstructs with a deft sword. Straddling literary strategies, no supposition nor paradigm is safe. He slays the stereotypic dragons within as well as without, putting popular culture, elegy, nightmare, personal narrative, identity and gender politics in the same hat, and drawing from the source, Pompa plays a poetic hand for keeps. Every turn of trope is more delightful than the next — a breakaway collection from an exciting new writer.


Lorna Dee Cervantes



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