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Gobshite Quarterly 2021 Launch/ with Michael Shay’s The Words I Own
October 29, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
FreeLaunching Gobshite Quarterly 2021!
This first annual, pandemic issue begins with iconic images from the 2020 Black Lives Matter and 1968 Mexico City Olympics protests. Other graphics include Brazilian Tania Cardoso’s illustrations of loneliness, Portland’s Leanne Grabel’s bio of Anne Sexton, and Croatian Miroslav Nemeth’s linocuts on fathers, sons and violence.
Our written accounts of living in these times include a selection of Washington poet Armin Toletino’s Superboy poems, Christina Alvarez Lopez on running and Keith Jarrett, poems from Greece, Lithuania, Estonia and New York, and fiction from Slovenia and Springfield, Oregon. Australian artist Graham Willoughby’s fine line etchings illuminate the covers.
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“Pan-lingual Gobshite Quarterly, where Paul Krassner meets Vénus Khoury-Ghata, is my favorite source for Hungarian fiction that reads like a song… In its pages English language poems, short stories, and ‘reasoned rants’ nervously traverse a dark alley, past a gauntlet of hipster Arabs, dangerous Czechs, and Spanish cantoras.”
— Chris Dodge, Utne Magazine
Michael Shay – THE WORDS I OWN – Reprobate/GobQ Books, Portland, 2020
The trees in Michael Shay’s garden argue. Despite their moss his garden ornaments remain defiantly unnatural. Michael Shay’s work is about experience: home and landscape and family, love and death and memory. It’s about falling short and unselfconscious altruism; it describes the weather of the world and self. His clouds are clouds and his rain, rain. But his clouds and rain and summers and autumns are also about joy and renewal.
Michael Shay’s poetry whispers in the reader’s ear that before we are “ready to drink with death/ He drinks with [us].” He understands the importance of rising each time we fall, the fusion of love and living.
– Christopher Luna, author of Message From A Vessel In A Dream, editor of Ghost Town Poetry, Volumes 1 & 2Michael Shay’s collection is a study in contrasts. Permanence and transience. Joy and sorrow. Stillness and frenzy. An ever-shifting kaleidoscope of experience and memory, these poems quietly but insistently conjure fragments of the poet’s private world where, if a cross carried in the mind alone is a weight without conclusion, constant love also replenishes constant love.
– Brenda Taulbee, author of The Art Of Waking Up