Sarah Arvio: Lexington, KY, April 17th Reading from Sono

(From Eileen Abel)





Hi all

The poet Sarah Arvio is coming to Lexington soon.

Come meet Sarah and hear her read from her new book Sono (sample below)

Sarah Arvio: Reading and Reception
April 17 at 7:00 p.m.
Commonwealth House
226 East Maxwell Street, Lexington

For her first book Visits from the Seventh, Sarah was awarded the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome. Sono was written mostly during her stay there. Both books were publish by Knopf. Sarah is a translator at the UN.

An excerpt from Sono:
Hope

I said this: would you give me back my hope

if I suffered hard enough, if I tried.

That hip-swinging hallelujah of hope,



that hip-hip-hooray we were talking about,

raying outward from the hip or the heart,

holistic, holy—those were all high things—



hyper-radical and hyper-real,

that gospel of helix and radiance.

Hail me, hail me, here I am alive,



falling from the lips of the lioness,

lambent and loved, gamboling like a lamb,

having gambled all my griefs and lost them.



Game of the gods, gamine of the cards,

inhaler of hashish and helium.

Here was the hub of the halo again,



the hub or nub of the halo or heart,

and the trope of turning to say hello;

we always said it “helio-hello.”



Hello to the little girl and lambkin,

garrulous, hilarious, all grown up,

nibbling on nothing and feeling okay,



and sweetly holding hands with the harpist,

turning toward the sun, turning toward the sound

—my warp of the world, my harp of the heart—



sounding like myself, as I always sound,

snappy and stylish and too sonorous,

a little savage and a little sweet.


© 2006, Sarah Arvio



Book jacket from Sono:

From the author of the highly praised Visits from the Seventh, a new collection of bracingly original poems. Composed during a long stay in Rome, these “cantos” look outward in order to look inward, transforming sights and stories into expressionistic explorations of the state of the heart. Playful, probing, philosophical, colorful, often funny, they describe a struggle to come to terms with loss and grief and to find terms for renewal; they ask whether and how life is worth living, taking pleasure in the questions themselves. “It wasn’t the life I would have wanted, had I known what sort of life I did want,” starts the poem entitled “Chagrin.” “I do believe I was never loved,” announces “Obelisk.” Riffing expertly, Sarah Arvio brings wit and exquisite formal discipline to her gorgeous meditations on the life lived. These are high-burning songs of the self, colloquial, sexy, unflinching and unforgettable.

A colossal mess I made of my life,
in the flesh and also in the round;
this was the essence of colosseum,

the museum of my colossal shame
where I mused on the blood sport of it all…
(from "Colosseum")

Sarah Arvio was born in 1954 and grew up in New York City. For Visits from the Seventh (2002), her first book of poems, she won the Rome Prize and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Poems in that that volume were awarded The Paris Review's B. F. Conners Prize and Poetry's Frederick Bock Prize. Arvio works as a translator for the United Nations.

Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York