Tomorrow evening …

Evening Landscape

There is something scary about the children’s games.

The neon hopscotch at dusk. The way

everything rhymes, or seems to.

Is this about you? It is about tenderness.

So, yes, perhaps.



**** NEW BOOK PARTY + MOVIE PREMIERE ****

PLEASE COME AND CELEBRATE THE PUBLICATION OF
LEONARD GONTAREK’S NEW BOOK OF POEMS,
TAKE YOUR HAND OUT OF MY POCKET, SHIVA,

AND THE PHILADELPHIA PREMIERE OF
14 PHOTOS FROM THE BRIDGE, THE AWARD-WINNING SHORT FILM
BY LORI ERSOLMAZ BASED ON HIS POEM,
SPONSORED BY MOTIONPOEMS AND THE WEISMAN ART MUSEUM


SIGNING & READING, WITH GUEST READERS

SEMI-FORMAL (OPTIONAL)

POPCORN WILL BE PROVIDED

FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 6 PM, 2016
PENN BOOKSTORE
3601 WALNUT STREET
PHILADELPHIA PA
(On the University of
Pennsylvania Campus)

TAKE YOUR HAND OUT OF MY POCKET, SHIVA (HANGING LOOSE PRESS, 2016)

“This is a book of human hungers so exact in its recognitions it leaves a reader stricken with a sense not just of how detailed our desires are, but how rare it is to have them articulated in ways yet unspoken. 'In my poor country, we poured sugar/ on everything to not notice our hunger,' Leonard Gontarek writes, but where that coat of sweetening fails, this poet stays to record what is still needed, what is still hungry, what is still so very, and beautifully, human.”

—Katie Ford, author of Blood Lyrics and Colosseum



Leonard Gontarek is the author of six books of poems, including He Looked Beyond
My Faults and Saw My Needs and Déjà vu Diner. His poems have appeared in
American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Verse, Blackbird, The Awl, Spinning Jenny,
and The Best American Poetry, among others. He coordinates Peace/Works,
Philly Poetry Day, The Philadelphia Poetry Festival, and hosts The Green Line
Reading & Interview Series. Gontarek has received Poetry fellowships from the
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Philadelphia Writers Conference Community Service Award, and was a Literary Death Match Champion. His poem, 37 Photos
From The Bridge, was a Poetry winner for the Big Bridges MotionPoems project
and the basis for the award-winning film by Lori Ersolmaz sponsored by the
Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.