Portland Public Library hosts a Literary Lunch with Lee Sharkey
in conversation with Stuart Kestenbaum
Wednesday, April 19th at noon in the Rines Auditorium
Join us for a conversation between Lee Sharkey and Stuart Kestenbaum about poetry and Sharkey’s newest book Walking Backwards. The conversation will be held in the Rines Auditorium at noon on Wednesday, April 19th. There will be time for audience questions at the end of the program.
About the book
Walking Backwards examines resistance to violence and repression through evocations of contemporary events and conversations with poets and artists whose voices arise from the Holocaust. Employing a remarkable variety of formal strategies— lyrics, parables, testimony, paratactic narratives and re-castings of Torah stories, inter-leavings with other texts—these poems offer a complex vantage on cultural erasure and persistence. Sharkey conjures a simultaneous present to reclaim a heritage expressed by gaps and silencing. Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and the Yiddish language poets Abraham Sutzkever and Peretz Markish become contemporaries, as her words mingle with theirs to bear the weight of the unspoken. “What have we come for,” the poet asks, “to sleep where the dead slept in the bed of our absence?” What redemption she finds is in language.
About the Series
Portland Public Library’s Literary Lunch series is held monthly and features authors from New England in conversation about new works. Conversations are generally wide ranging and engaging.
All Literary Lunches are free to the public. Because they take place over the lunch hour, guests are encouraged to bring their lunch; coffee provided by Coffee By Design.
