Readings.

I will be giving a reading with John Tipton and Leila Wilson on Tuesday, December 6, 2022 for the Cactus Flower Reading Series at 3454 N. Bell Ave., in Roscoe Village. I’ll be reading from The Hidden Eyes of Things for the first time in Chicago since the book was published this past summer. John will be reading from his amazing new book Believers. And Leila will be reading from new work. Exciting!

Speaking of Hidden Eyes, I read the Neptune section of the poem at the Poetry and Spirituality symposium at Xavier University last month, hosted by the great Norman Finkelstein.

Here is a link to the video from the reading.

Last month, I joined Al Filreis, Laynie Brown, and Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué to discuss H.D.’s legendary poem “Heat,” along with Robert Duncan’s magisterial reading of the poem from the opening of The H.D. Book. This is part of the free ModPo (“Modern & Contemporary American Poetry”) course that runs out of Kelly Writers House and Penn.

Speaking some more of Hidden Eyes, here is a link to a flatteringly perceptive review of the book by the (once again) great Norman Finkelstein. You may have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to get to the review.

And here is a similarly perceptive and impressively argued interpretation of The Sampo by Sean Reynolds. This essay, “Translation for the End Times: Peter O’Leary’s The Sampo,” appears in an anthology called Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms, edited by David Hadbawnik.

Translation for the End Times: Peter O’Leary’s The Sampo

Finally, “I’m Sorry for Everything.”

Vigorous incantation.

The Sampo is alive, churning out coins, salt, magic, language. Geoffrey O’Brien mentions the poem in an article he has written about a new translation of The Kalavela published in the New York Review of Books. Writes O’Brien, “Writers of fantasy and science fiction continue to draw on [the Kalevala]. The American poet Peter O’Leary has recently taken its central narrative thread as the springboard for The Sampo (2016), a vigorously incantatory poem to which I am grateful for leading me back to the Kalevala legends.”

Earth, thankfully, continues to be Best. Kylan Rice has written an extensive review of Earth Is Best for West Branch, which includes a similarly extensive review of Toby Martinez de las Rivas’s Black Sun, a book I return to constantly for its incandescent language and bracing severity. About Earth Is Best, writes Rice: “‘What if the god is a mushroom after all?’ O’Leary wonders, reversing the allegorical paradigm that would see in sporing image of the resurrection, rather than vice versa. Intent on its this-wordliness, O’Leary mythologizes fungus in the hope of returning us to the earth not as a purified paradiso terrestre, but as an uneven terrain of laborious and localized healing in the aftermath of catastrophe.”

Finally, Knapsack has become Gabby Start. Here is his first video.