Matthea Harvey

Matthea Harvey, who recently won a very nice poetry award - the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Prize - will be one of two women at tonight’s Observable Readings (8 p.m. April 9 at Schlafly Bottleworks).

The other poet featured is Mairéad Byrne, who teaches at Rhode Island School of Design and is the author of  ”Talk Poetry” (Miami University Press 2007), “SOS Poetry” (/ubu Editions 2007), and “Nelson & The Huruburu Bird” (Wild Honey Press 2003).

Mairéad Byrne

Byrne, who spent the first 20 years of her life in Dublin, has said she  “came to America in order to survive as a poet.  There are multiple traditions here, a very rich array.  I adore teaching 20th century poetry.”
Harvey is the author of three books of poetry: “Modern Life” (Graywolf, 2007), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, “Sad Little Breathing Machine” (Graywolf, 2004) and “Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form” (Alice James Books, 2000).

 Harvey, who grew up in Wisconsin, was profiled recently in the the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, which said she is “a contemporary poet enchanted with wordplay, and writing about hybrid beings and devastation and terror. ‘Modern Life,’ for instance, contains a pair of poems — ‘Terror of the Future’  and ‘The Future of Terror’ — that deal with the disconnect between civilians and the militia in a post-apocalyptic world. And she writes of a ‘robo-boy,’ half robot, half boy.

“‘I think I’ve always been interested in dividing lines — whether they were borders or countries, or the dividing line in water (above and below the waterline),” she said in a phone interview. “I was thinking of animals who were half one thing and half another thing. Of a robot boy.”

“‘The terror poems, she said, were “almost political poems addressing the political climate post-Sept. 11. But they were quite transformed, sort of like the moon’s relation to the Earth. Not exactly connected to this world, but reflected to and connected to this world in that way.’”