Upcoming October Readings

Thursday October 8th, 7:00 Modern Times Bookstore, San Francisco with Ananda Esteva, Maiana Minahal, Dani Montgomery. Civil Defense Poetry night!

Monday October 12th, 7:00 Avanti Popolo: Italian Americans Sailing Beyond Columbus, City Lights Bookstore, SF Annual anti-Columbus celebration of real Italian American culture. WIth Michael Parenti and others. www.citylights.com

Saturday October 17th, 6:00 Litquake Litcrawl, phase 1. Manic D Press Showcase at Adobe Books, San Francisco Thea Hillman, Jon Longhi, Tarin Towers, Jennifer Blowdryer, James Tracy, Eric Spitznagel, Jennifer Joseph www.manicdpress.com, http://www.litquake.org

Saturday October 24th, workshop at Santa Cruz State University Practical Activism Conference http://activism.ucsc.edu. My friends from Headrush Crew are going to hold down the spoken word. Not to be missed.

Rooks-Poetry Review

Review originally published in Beyond Chron.

Now that Journalists are finally asking some hard (but basic) questions about what really led the nation into the latest phase in the war in Iraq; questions of how individuals are prepared to fight wars may be better left to the poets. No poet is better qualified to ask these questions than Gil Fagiani. In “Rooks,” his second collection of poetry, Fagiani, take the reader on a bare-knuckled tour of Pennsylvania Military College, against the backdrop of the Vietnam war.

Fagiani’s work, like the PMC itself, is tightly controlled.. The freshman (rook) year is best thought of as a factory where young civilians are forged into elite officers, eventually to command and pass the abuse onto the next generation of cadets. In Spit Shines, Fagiani recalls the discipline and punish that makes mountains out of molehills:

At the morning muster, Sergeant Kotowski
Swaggers up to me
Points to a speck of dust on one shoe
“Hey, douche bag,
what did you polish your shoes with,
Brillo pads?”