Due to an unforseen illness this event is canceled.
Please join Porter Square Books for an evening of poetry with Doug Holder and Elizabeth Kirschner.
Two poets with a common knowledge. Two points of view from a shared experience--the kept and the keeper--of life in the psych ward. Both know what it's like to be behind the red line six feet from the locked door of the unit. One could cross over it, go home, the other could not. Hence poet Elizabeth Kirschner as one of the kept. Hence poet Doug Holder as one of the keepers. Two separate books--My Life as a Doll--by Kirschner and From the Back Bay to the Back Ward by Holder, a pick of the month in the Small Press Review.
The lock-up, the ward. One reading. So just what goes on behind the red line? Kirschner's book, nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize, is a survivor's tale, a memoir in verse which has devoted one of its four sections, "Tra-la-la," to depicting in detail the Dantesque inferno of the unit. The other three are a harrowing account of the childhood abuse that later erupted into terrifying flights into madness which have led and still lead her to life behind the red line, that holding tank of the damned.
Doug Holder founded the Ibbetson Street Press in the winter of 1998 in Somerville, Mass. Holder is the arts/editor for The Somerville News, a co-founder of "The Somerville News Writers Festival (founded in 2003)," and is the curator of the "Newton Free Library Poetry Series" in Newton, Mass. Holder's articles and poetry have appeared in several anthologies including: Inside the Outside: An Anthology of Avant-Garde American Poets, Greatest Hits: Twelve Years of Compost Magazine, and America's Favorite Poems edited by Robert Pinsky. His work has also appeared Rattle, Hazmat, The Boston Globe Magazine, Caesura, Poesy, Small Press Review, Northeast Corridor, and many others. He is the author of Of All The Meals I Had Before..., No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain, and The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel. In 2009 he released a collection of interviews: From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers.
Elizabeth Kirschner is the author of five books, Slow Risen Among the Smoke Trees, Postal Routes, Twenty Colors, Surrender to Light, and My Life as a Doll. She has collaborated with many composers both nationally and internationally and has had her lyrics set on two CDs The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons and New Dawn. She has taught at Boston College for many years and sponsors a mentorhsip program called "Wise Eye: Creating Poetry that Soars."