Underdonk

press release

Underdonk presents:

Poetry Reading by Blueberry Morningsnow and Lee Posna

Sunday, March 14th, 2021

5 pm (eastern), 4 pm (central)

Join Reading Here

Zoom ID: 895 6010 3139

Friend-poets and writing allies Lee Posna (Brooklyn, NY) and Blueberry Morningsnow (Ames, IA) will read texts they created in parallel during early covid life–spring and summer 2020.

Morningsnow’s poems try to map love as if it is an alert part of the landscape–like grass, bluebells, and stars–and in so doing, they point out the way it exists alongside time and its years and hours and losses as a sort of difficult playmate.  The maps of love also contain the search for love and belonging after the demise of a dysfunctional & emotionally abusive marriage–and all in the midst of the pandemic, solo parenthood,  and the recent death of her mother.

 “a convulsive living map: I gather the erupting here, where I am swimming in this body–terrarium, pitcher of dandelions–bearing the bloom, efflorescing at the pulse of an hour, an untellable future loop.”

Posna’s condensed journal entries follow ritualistically an underground river in search of its sources. Cut off by the pandemic from his work with a French man in rapid decline from Alzheimer’s, he relies on his memory, which he rightfully distrusts but which is his only guide, to document, to bear borne witness, to make contact. These entries reveal the contours of a triple faith: the poet’s in the structures of knowing she contains beyond illumination; the human’s in a past that exists only in neural patterns but constitutes the portrait of a coherent life; the lover’s in touch beyond utility.

“The personality of my old friend, you could say his essence since it’s a dream, unfolded like a map of the moment’s sky against the size of the sky. I had only to name my object for it to become its background, nothing more was asked of me. I wish I could, you know, reattain the height of that freedom, italicized, detached as Matisse.”

Blueberry Morningsnow lives in Ames, Iowa with her 12 year old son, two dogs, and one cat. She has published one book of poems, Whale in the Woods, and has written another one during the pandemic.

Lee Posna lives, reads and writes in Brooklyn, NY. He works on winteranthology.com and is looking for a job (and a publisher!). His favorite poets include Dan Beachy-Quick and Anne Carson, and a book he often recommends is “Dreams and Stones” by Magdalena Tulli.