Garrett Hongo will read from and sign his new book, “Ocean of Clouds: Poems,” on Sunday, Nov. 2, from 4 to 5 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena.
He will appear with Robin Coste Lewis, author of “Archive of Desire: A Poem in Four Parts for C.P. Cavafy.”
The purchase of the books from Vroman’s is greatly appreciated and makes events like this possible.
In his fourth book of poems, award-winning poet Hongo sees coastlines and waters, skylines and ancestral lines for what they inspire and teach.
In a surpassingly beautiful collection of poems, with his characteristic long-lined, rolling music, Hongo is alert to the possibilities of individual moments of perception and grace in the landscapes of his life, whether waiting for a ferry in Balboa after a writing workshop (“An oil slick from a yacht … / Spread rainbows on the water, an aleph / curving toward us”) or hanging out and playing LPs with the late, great poet Michael Harper, or watching his daughter in the sun with a halo of messy 12-year-old’s hair, or listening to the sea, which speaks to him in so many places: at the Wai’ōpae Tidepools, at Cassis, at Divi Bay in Saint Martin, where, he tells us, “I thought of writing to the soul of Nâzim Hikmet, / saying loving a woman was like writing a book– / … it is love’s body on which you write a page of kisses …”
These poems of cloudy moons and sandstone cliffsides, the black glass of lava shattered into sands, waves surging, and stories of a poet’s gratitude for the journey he has made, come together to make a paean against forgetting.
About ‘Archive of Desire’
National Book Award, PEN/Voelcker Award, and NAACP Image Award winner Robin Coste Lewis returns with another inventive and boundary-breaking book: a sensual journey ignited in the archives of iconic queer Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy.
In her first book, Lewis’ poems exploded the imagery of the Black female figure from antiquity through the present day. Her second book was an expansive hybrid photographic and poetic study of human migration and the human family. Now she delivers a “poem in four parts,” which originated as a musical, visual, and lyrical collaboration with composer Vijay Iyer, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and visual artist Julie Mehretu, with Lewis on the microphone offering a live reading of this sequence.
Ignited by their encounters with Cavafy’s archive, in the heart of Athens, the multimedia quartet exalted the liminal spaces where desire and diaspora meet — where art often asserts itself most forcefully. In this volume, Lewis brings this performance to life on the page, where the poem weaves in and out of Cavafy’s bedrooms, notebooks, and the suppressed erotic excavation underpinning all of his work.
Lewis converses directly with Cavafy: “often you / reminded us that // the only true / barbarians are the ones / raging in silence inside // of our own / minds.” But she also brings equal parts of herself to this study of artistry and sensuality, as in the short, tender section entitled “Cavafy in Compton/Closet Anthem: Self-Portrait at Sixteen, 1979.”
As in all Lewis’ works, here she reaches across centuries to express what is timeless and not bound by our current moment or our single selves: the discipline and glory of art, the give-and-take of love, the kiss that lives in the moment, and the unfolding journey of being human, whose contours become clear only with the passage of time, the igniting of memory, and the words we find to describe the journey.
For more information, call (626) 449-5320 or visit https://vromansbookstore.com/.