FARMINGTON – Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno will read from her new collection of poems, Slamming Open the Door, on Thursday, Oct. 8, at 7 p.m. in Lincoln Auditorium on the University of Maine at Farmington campus. With Slamming Open the Door, Bonanno grieves her daughter Leidy Bonanno’s murder, subsequent police investigation and trial.
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This event is sponsored by SAVES, Alice James Books, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and the UMF Creative Writing Department and benefits SAVES, Franklin County’s sexual assault crisis response project.
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Leidy Bonanno, a recent nursing school graduate, was found dead in her apartment in 2003, strangled with a telephone cord by an ex-boyfriend. From the moment she is told of her daughter’s murder, the English teacher and writer documents the difficult process of a parent’s mourning through a police investigation and criminal trial in her collection of poems.
The New York Times writes of the collection: “Readers will have to step outside of a familiar, comforting tradition of poetic grief while reading this book.” To read the review, click here.
Two of the book’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.Bonanno is a contributing editor of The American Poetry Review. She teaches English and creative writing in Pennsylvania.
Excerpt from Slamming Open the Door by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno; Alice James Books publ. Copyright 2009:
POEM ABOUT LIGHT
You can try to strangle light:
use your hands and think
you’ve found the throat of it,
but you haven’t.
You could use a rope or a garrote
or a telephone cord,
but the light, amorphous, implacable,
will make a fool of you in the end.
You could make it your mission
to shut it out forever,
to crouch in the dark,
the blinds pulled tight–
still, in the morning,
a gleaming little ray will betray you, poking
its optimistic finger
through a corner of the blind,
and then more light,
clever, nervy, impossible,
spilling out from the crevices
warming the shade.
This is the stubborn sun,
choosing to rise,
like it did yesterday,
like it will tomorrow.
You have nothing to do with it.
The sun makes its own history;
light has its way.
