Carolyn Hembree - RIGGING A CHEVY INTO A TIME MACHINE AND OTHER WAYS TO ESCAPE A PLAGUE
Presented in partnership with Public Poetry, with special thanks to Poets & Writers for their generous support.
Also check out Hembree's Love Machine for Poetry: A Workshop Experience hosted by Public Poetry on Monday, January 23 from 7:30-8:00pm.
Carolyn Hembree’s award-winning collection RIGGING A CHEVY INTO A TIME MACHINE AND OTHER WAYS TO ESCAPE A PLAGUE is a sequence of poems arranged like a truck owner’s manual. Set in rural Appalachia, “a truck up on concrete blocks” functions as time machine for V. Cleb, an accursed wanderer trapped and liberated by the limits of his world. When spiritual and material realms commingle, visions of cosmic significance are revealed. Biblical cadences, elliptical phrasing, and a deep-rooted vernacular distinguish the voice of these poems. “Through wormhole after wormhole,” the book inscribes a landscape visceral, haunted, afflicted, afflicting.
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THURSDAY, MAY 16 -- 7 PM
Buenos Aires, 1977. In the darkest days of the Videla dictatorship, G mez, a gay high-school literature teacher, tries to keep a low profile as one-by-one, his friends and students begin to disappear. When Esteban, one of G mez's favorite students, is taken away in a classroom raid, G mez realizes that no one is safe anymore, and that asking too many questions can have lethal consequences. His life gradually becomes a paranoid, insomniac nightmare that not even his nightly forays into bars and bathhouses in search of anonymous sex can relieve. Things get even more complicated when he takes in two dissidents, putting his life at risk--especially since he's been having an affair with a homophobic, sadistic cop with ties to the military government. Told mostly in flashbacks thirty years later, 77 is rich in descriptive detail, dream sequences, and even elements of the occult, which build into a haunting novel about absence and the clash between morality and survival when living under a dictatorship.