Oliver de la Paz &

Jason Koo

Thursday, November 5, 2009

“The Writer’s Story,” 3:30PM, Garfield Book Company
Reading, 5:30PM, The Regency Room


Oliver de la Paz is the author of two collections of poetry, Names Above Houses and Furious Lullaby, both published by Southern Illinois University Press.  He chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry.  A recipient of a NYFA Fellowship Award and a GAP Grant from Artist Trust, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry:  The Next Generation.  He teaches at Western Washington University in Bellingham.



Jason Koo is the author of Man on Extremely Small Island, winner of the 2008 De Novo Poetry Prize.  He holds a B.A. in English from Yale, an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Houston, and a Ph.D. in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia.  The recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he has published his poetry and prose in numerous journals, including The Yale Review, North American Review and The Missouri Review.  He currently lives in New York, where he teaches at NYU and Lehman College and serves as Poetry Editor of Low Rent.



If, Given


If given a horse, a palomino, I’d ride

the high dunes to meet you at sunrise.


If there were no horse, only shoes and sand, I’d start

with the left foot and with the right,


I’d drag a path for you to follow.

The yellow storms would not pursue because


the law between us is holy. 





Self-Reproduction with Scream Pillow


I was lying in bed again, after waking again,

After sleeping again, feeling demolished but poised

When nothing occurred to me, nothing

Knocked on the door, nothing came swinging

Into my vision.  The phone rang, I heard my voice

Saying I wasn’t here; then staticking silence,

Then silence; then the phone rang again, again

I heard my voice, it sounded exactly the same.

I was trying to read the light in the room, the losses

It took as it passed through the dust-filmed

Blinds, from the leaves of the tree…