Sugar House Review in partnership with the Utah Humanities Council is pleased to announce a reading with poets Nick Demske, author of Nick Demske, and Rob Carney, author of Story Problems on Monday, October 24th at 7:00 p.m. at the Mount Tabor Lutheran Church (175 South 700 East). This event is free and open to the public and is part of the Utah Humanities Council Book Festival. Sugar House Review would like to thank them for their sponsorship.
Nick Demske’s first collection, Nick Demske, is ostensibly a collection of sonnets, though it’s more like sonnet taxidermy, the sonnet eviscerated. The hide is in place, the constraints are there, but our pet is no longer our pet. The eyes are different and the lips curl up just so. The fourteen lines are present, except when they trail off. The rhyme schemes, while they shift from poem to poem, are nearly always present though Demske innovates on the form by simply breaking words as is convenient to make rhymes work, a move now known as “the Demske.” These breaks are startling, confusing, and simultaneously hilarious once the pattern begins to emerge.
Nick Demske writes from culture like the Hollywood version of a rebellious slave, the role shredding off him, culture's synthetic exemplary tales shredding and piling up on the floor of the projector room, but non-biodegradable, sticking around, the pancake makeup also strangely persisting, rendering his face plastic and one with the material of the film, the celluloid itself. How can we tell this dancer from his nasty dance? The sonnet is one brief sequence played backwards and forwards until its fake, twitchy face says everything. –Joyelle McSweeney
Nick Demske lives in Racine Wisconsin and works there at the Racine Public Library. His self-titled manuscript was chosen by Joyelle McSweeney for the Fence Modern Poets Series Award and published by Fence Books in 2010. He is a founder and editor of the online forum boo: a journal of terrific things (http://boojournal.wordpress.
Rob Carney is originally from Washington State and earned his BA from Pacific Lutheran University, his MFA from Eastern Washington University, and his PhD from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He is the author of New Fables, Old Songs (Dream Horse Press, 2003) and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts (Pinyon Press, 2003), which won the 2004 Utah Book Award for Poetry. His collection This Is One Sexy Planet won the 2005 Frank Cat Press Annual Poetry Chapbook Contest, and he won The National Poetry Review's 2004 Chapbook competition for The Book of the Living. His writing has appeared previously in Atlanta Review, Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, and many others, as well as in the collection Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton, 2006). Currently, he is a professor at Utah Valley State College and lives with his son Quentin in Salt Lake City.
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