Poetry: Every Dress a Decision, with Elizabeth Austen, and Woodnote, with Christine Deavel

Start: 02/12/2012 3:00 pm

End: 02/12/2012 4:00 pm

Public radio poetry commentator Elizabeth Austen tests the boundaries between the known and the unknowable in her debut poetry collection, Every Dress a Decision.

The aftermath of a brother’s mysterious death forms a subtle narrative spine, around which other pressing questions revolve. In a voice both lyrical and wry, Austen’s poems engage headlong in the contradictions of 21^st century social expectations, desires and identity.

Elizabeth Austen is the author of two chapbooks, The Girl Who Goes Alone and Where Currents Meet, part of the 2010 Toadlily Press quartet, Sightline. Her poems have appeared online The Writer's Almanac and Verse Daily, and in journals including Willow Springs, Bellingham Reveiw, the Los Angeles Review, the Seattle Review, DMQ Review, and anthologies including Poets Against the War, Weathered Pages and In the Telling.

WOODNOTE is Christine Deavel's debut and winner of the 2011 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. Indiana is the backdrop for poems that range through time and lyrically blend poetry, prose, and fragment to deliver their news: "Knowledge comes as a covering snow; below is the old understanding."

A resident of Seattle, Christine Deavel has worked as a bookseller for over 20 years. With her husband, the poet J.W. Marshall, she runs Open Books: A Poem Emporium, one of three poetry-only bookstores in the United States. She is a graduate of Indiana University and the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in FENCE, TALISMAN, VOLT, and other journals, as well as in the chapbook Box of Little Spruce, published by LitRag Press, and in the volume Looking Together: Writers on Art, published by the University of Washington Press.