Athens, Ga. – The Georgia Review will celebrate its Summer 2014 issue release with readings by poet Alice Friman, prose writer John Brown Spiers and poet Thibault Raoult on July 18 at 7 p.m. at Ciné, 234 W. Hancock Ave.
The free event will include a collaborative poetry activity called an exquisite corpse, which is a parlor game where everyone is invited to contribute a line to a poem while only being allowed to see the directly preceding line. Complimentary snacks will be served and beverages will be available for purchase through Ciné.
Friman, nationally known author of numerous collections and a regular contributor to The Georgia Review, has new work in the summer issue. Spiers and Raoult join the event as Review assistants to the editors-Spiers as the outgoing and Raoult as the incoming for 2014-15. Both are associated with the University of Georgia’s Ph.D. in creative writing program.
In addition to poems by Friman, the summer issue includes photo collage art from vintage-magazine aficionado Nadine Boughton; fiction from George Singleton and Gary Gildner; poetry from Jim Daniels, William Trowbridge, newcomer Emily Nason and others; and a special five-part essay feature, “Strange and Wondrous Pairings.”
Each essay in “Strange and Wondrous Pairings” raises very different questions about the people or characters they bring together in quite unexpected ways: Brian Doyle reconstitutes the conversation that might have happened during Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson’s one-time real-life meeting; Brandon R. Schrand explores what happens after he opened a 1944 edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems to find a photograph of a dead teenage girl inside; National Book Critics Circle-award winner Albert Goldbarth ferrets out the vital connections between stargazers John Keats and Clyde Tombaugh (the young man who discovered the now-maligned “planet” Pluto); Marianne Boruch’s essay “Pilgrimage” takes the reader to and through the homes of Keats (on the Isle of Wight) and a seminal American poet, Theodore Roethke (in Saginaw, Michigan); and Martha G. Wiseman’s “Dr. No Meets J. Robert Oppenheimer” revisits this movie villain and this real-life celebrity scientist while looking through the prism of her father, actor Joseph Wiseman, who played the two in film and on stage, respectively.
Copies of the new issue will be available for purchase at the event, as will select back issues at special sale prices. For more information about UGA’s internationally known quarterly journal of arts and letters, see www.thegeorgiareview.com or call 706-542-3481.
