Steady, My Gaze: Poet Marie-Elizabeth Mali’s London book launch

Starts: Monday, February 6th 2012 at 7:30 pm
Ends: Monday, February 6th 2012 at 8:30 pm

The London Literary Salon welcomes Marie-ELizabeth Mali for an evening of readings and discussion around the art and craft of poetry.To celebrate the launch of her book Steady, My Gaze, we will gather at The Pineapple Pub in Kentish Town; price is the purchase of a libation and the gift of your attention. Copies of Steady, My Gaze will be available for purchase that evening; please email The London Literary Salon to reserve your place.
Marie-Elizabeth Mali is the author of Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach, 2011) and co-editor with Annie Finch of the forthcoming anthology, Villanelles (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2012). She serves as co-curator for the Page Meets Stage reading series in New York City, and for the past two and a half years also served as co-curator for louderARTS: the Reading Series. Her work has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, and has appeared in Calyx, Poet Lore, and RATTLE, among others. For more information, please visit www.memali.com.

“Wholehearted” is an undervalued word; to my mind it means not blind enthusiasm or unthinking embrace but something more like the full consent of the self to experience, to be present in the glorious and wounding matrix of the here and now. I can’t think of a better word for Marie-Elizabeth Mali’s poems. She wants “the honeyed sizzle beyond all language,” wants to be a vulnerable and conscious participant in the life of things as they are, awake to love and the struggle to live freely and compassionately. “How to hold the ocean,” she asks, “when the vessel leaks? Rise your wild, / dear animal . . .”—Mark Doty

Wherever her well-versed gaze lands, whatever chords she seizes and sings, however she chooses to tango across the floor of your imagination, you are assured to be embraced and hypnotically swept up by Marie-Elizabeth Mali’s stylish rotations of thought and pivoting reflections. What she executes in language, “all flit and hover,” is no mere feat and goes beyond our standard fare of dramatic recall and gestural redemption. The poems in Steady, My Gaze announce this poet as, also, spiritually awake and sagacious, full of the necessary vitality to stir our souls, to make a distinctive sound in the din of our modern world. —Major Jackson

Attuned to the sensual and the sacred, Marie-Elizabeth Mali is engaged in “the pursuit of some ground to call home.” A restless traveler of the landscapes of self and the self’s origins, and of the heart’s affections, Mali is always a seeker reminding us to “Praise this beautiful, terrible world where we are opened / and rushed.” Steady, My Gaze offers the gift of keenly observed, celebratory poems from a passionate spirit. —Kim Addonizio