Brazos Bookstore presents An Evening of Poetry on Monday, May 19 at 7pm.
David Tomas Martinez will read from his collection, Hustle. The speaker of these poems steals cars, runs away with canyons, sits in understudy at the bar, fathers a child before seventeen, and works welding frigates, all with no reverence for literature with clean streets. “If I ever met a kid like Holden Caulfield, I would punch him in his nose,” Martinez says, and it is with Dantean confidence that he constructs San Diego as an inferno of El Caminos and Fords, silent sex, and murdered high school
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Brazos Bookstore presents An Evening of Poetry on Monday, May 19 at 7pm.
David Tomas Martinez will read from his collection, Hustle. The speaker of these poems steals cars, runs away with canyons, sits in understudy at the bar, fathers a child before seventeen, and works welding frigates, all with no reverence for literature with clean streets. “If I ever met a kid like Holden Caulfield, I would punch him in his nose,” Martinez says, and it is with Dantean confidence that he constructs San Diego as an inferno of El Caminos and Fords, silent sex, and murdered high school valedictorians.
Martinez’s youth as a Latino in the city is documented in Hustle as it moves from gang activity through his discovery of pornography to a failed suicide attempt on a crooked path toward self-understanding. He doesn’t intend to make the journey alone: “This is mine. / Where is the window to break / in your life?” This brave and honest collection works as an apt guide through the circles of a modern urban existence.
Martinez has published in San Diego Writer's Ink, Charlotte Journal, Poetry International, and been featured in Border Voices. A Ph.D. candidate at the University of Houston, he is also an editor for Gulf Coast.
Karyna McGlynn will read from her work, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems. The 2008 Kathryn A. Morton Prize Winner, this is poetry with a Sonic Youth soundtrack.
McGlynn earned her BA from Seattle University and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the author of two chapbooks: Scorpionica (New Michigan Press, 2007) and Alabama Steve (Destructible Heart Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in Fence, Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, CutBank, and Ninth Letter.
She is pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston where she runs the Hounston Indie Book Fest and serves as Managing Editor of Gulf Coast.
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