a week of good readings

I just got home from seeing Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey read to an intimate gathering in the Mills Hall Living Room. It really did feel like a living room reading. Very fantastic work. They are a husband-and-wife pair of poets out from the U.K. and the force behind West House Books. Halsey's work blends activism and history and sound and imagery and place. He read from a collaboration called Danse Macabre that dealt with letterpress and printing and death. Monk read mostly from Escafeld Hangings, which is more or less about the town of Sheffield and its most famous resident, Mary Queen of Scots.