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Message from the Vessel in a Dream
February 2, 2019 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
FreeVintage Books Presents
A Reading and Book Signing Featuring
Matthew Eiford-Schroeder
& Christopher Luna
2pm
Saturday, February 2
Vintage Books
6613 E. Mill Plain Blvd.
Vancouver, WA 98661
http://www.vintage-books.com/
Matthew Eiford-Schroeder’s debut volume of poetry, Consistently East, was published by Printed Matter Vancouver in August 2018. Matthew wrote the poems in Consistently East as he emerged from the fog of a brain injury he suffered as a result of a violent attack. Join the poet on his global travels from Brooklyn, New York to London, across Mongolia via a charity rally, then on to Seoul, Korea. After returning to the West Coast of the United States to visit his family, Matthew attempted to work the oil fields of North Dakota before finally returning to Brooklyn, where he was assaulted. “I wrote these poems when the world stopped shaking enough for me to collect and organize words again. I had to rebuild myself, take an inventory of memories, then create. To begin to live in a world that had changed in a self that was no longer the same, but both not completely severed from the trauma and beauty of the past.”
Matthew Eiford-Schroeder was raised in Camas, Washington, where he spent a sizable portion of his time working and playing on his grandparents’ cattle farm. He moved around America, working retail and lifting heavy things, before eventually landing in New York, where he snuck into an art school and became a bouncer. He currently lives in Bellingham, where he is studying political science at Western Washington University.
“If art is animated by the shock of the new, Matthew Eiford-Schroeder has presented the reader with a top grade set of jumper cables. Consistently East is a startlingly good and often brilliant book of poems, one that makes harmony of its surface contrasts. Radical and clear in its language, cosmopolitan and Northwest homegrown in its intellectual sensibility, powerful in the way it interrogates the modern nature of power, it is a book that exemplifies the best verities of American travel literature by taking a hammer to the clichés of the genre at its worst. Reaching to both Whitman and Milosz, Consistently East is a book of the first rank that deserves to be read by as many people as possible.” Robert Lashley, Stranger Genius Award Nominee and author of The Homeboy Songs and Up South.
https://printedmattervancouver.com/publications/
Flowstone Press announces the release of Message from the Vessel in a Dream by Christopher Luna, Clark County, WA’s first poet laureate and the founder of Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic. Luna’s first full-length volume of poetry spans 20 years, and favors prose poetry and collage poems assembled and arranged using found materials. The book is dedicated to Carlos Santana, the guitar virtuoso and eponymous “vessel” who gifted Luna with the only line of poetry he has ever received from a dream.
Christopher Luna served as Clark County, WA’s first Poet Laureate from 2013-2017. He has an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and is the co-founder, with Toni Lumbrazo Luna, of Printed Matter Vancouver, an editing service and small press for Northwest writers. He and Lumbrazo Luna co-host Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic, the popular Vancouver, WA reading series he founded in 2004. Luna’s books include Brutal Glints of Moonlight, GHOST TOWN, USA and The Flame Is Ours: The Letters of Stan Brakhage and Michael McClure 1961-1978.
“How many Christopher Lunas are there? The bard, the community dynamo, the scholar, the compassionate one, the jazz quartet, the father & lover, the world of a man: all and more are speaking in this book. So many perspectives to experience here, so much to learn about literature, attitude, action and beauty. The maestro of Ghost Town has created a bustling, radiant and necessary environment.” Dan Raphael
Flowstone Press: https://leftfork.org/flowstone/available/
Christopher Luna reads the title poem from Message from the Vessel in a Dream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBSUywEm4aQ
“Message from a Teeming Mind” by Scott Hewitt for the Columbian:
https://www.columbian.com/news/2018/dec/08/message-from-a-teeming-mind/