Poetry Reading : Collier Nogues and Lisa Ciccarello

Poet Collier Nogues will read from her new book, “The Ground I Stand on Is Not My Ground,” winner of the Drunken Boat Poetry Contest for 2014. Joining Collier will be Lisa Ciccarello, whose excellent debut collection, “At Night”, was just released in April.

“The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground” is a hybrid of poetry and digital art. Its poems erase historical documents related to the development and aftermath of the Pacific War, especially on the island of Okinawa. Erased into poems, these texts become spare narratives of how individual soldiers’ and civilians’ daily lives were transformed by the war. The book’s companion website features each poem as an interactive erasure. Taken together, the poems and their original texts tell a larger story about the ways we imagine war, and the ways language can be used to record, justify, memorialize, or resist it.