Ander Monson reads from OTHER ELECTRICITIES and VACATIONLAND

Aug ’05
16
12:00 am

Ander Monson reads from OTHER ELECTRICITIES and VACATIONLANDSaturday, July 30th, 8:00 PMFREE
 
In Other Electricities we follow glimpses of dispossessed lives in the snow-buried reaches of Upper Michigan\’s Keweenaw Peninsula, where nearly everyone seems to be slipping away under the ice to disappear forever. There is Crisco Hatfield, the breaker of arms; Bone, dropper of bowling balls off interstate overpasses; The Oracle of Apollo in Tapiola, who sees all; Christer, a pyromaniac collector of pornography who jumps off cliffs for kicks; and most importantly there is Liz, the book\’s central obsession, an unknowable girl who crashed through the ice on prom night. Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short stories, lists, indices, and radio schematics, Monson presents a world where weather, landscape, radio waves, and electricity are influential characters in themselves, affecting an entire community held together by the memories of those they have lost.
 
The poems in Vacationland are set in Michigan?s Upper Peninsula, land of weather and long winters. His images: hotel pools full of refuse, wadded ATM receipts, cracked windshields in a land of endless snow, that all, ultimately, add benevolence and poise to life?s darker moments. In Monson?s world, the nearest city is a four-hour car ride and isolation is the backdrop for Monson?s vital yet haunting imaginings. His words stay with you and penetrate the heart like a beam of sunlight breaking across the icy Lake Michigan shore.
 
Ander Monson grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He lived briefly in Saudi Arabia, Iowa, and in the Deep South, where he received his MFA from the University of Alabama. He is the editor of the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including The North American Review, Fence, Field, Gulf Coast, The Bellingham Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and the Mississippi Review, among others
 
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