Blue Bicycle Books is proud to announce Yr Lad Bob, (Persistent Editions, San Francisco, pb., $9), the first book of poetry by longtime store manager Sara Peck.
Peck will read and sign copies Fri., Oct. 18, 7 pm, at Blue Bicycle Books. This event will also celebrate the release of Think of Me and I’ll Know: Stories (Tri-Quarterly, Chicago, pb., $18) by College of Charleston professor Anthony Varallo.
Taking its title from poet Robert Creeley’s letters to Charles Olson, Yr Lad, Bob is a reading through various works of the Black Mountain School. Combining lines of text appropriated from Creeley, Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan alongside her own annotations, Peck blurs the lines between writer and reader and responder, making clear the process of building something out of stuff; the hidden parts of composition are laid bare.
Peck somewhat self-deprecatingly calls Yr Lad, Bob “literary criticism written in verse,” but this belies how personal such a venture can be. Peck draws herself literally into her mentors’ lines, diving through and out again, breaking through the like the thin skin of water.
“ writing in the body – body with seasons, earth body-
Whitman-like but cleaner, or something, word choice skin!
It’s got to be / lighter
line break
is it / hands across this body of water
the sea has so many hands, mouths—Neruda, body parts that
hold things ascribed to water—the water is the holder rather than the held”
— from Yr Lad, Bob
Sara Peck grew up in Greenville, graduated from the College of Charleston and received an MFA at Columbia College in Chicago. She is a popular counselor and teacher at Blue Bicycle Books’ Write of Summer camp for kids and University School of the Lowcountry. She is published or forthcoming with OmniVerse, Everyday Genius, and Versal, among others.
Anthony Varallo’s previous two books are This Day in History, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and Out Loud, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. He is an associate professor of English at the College of Charleston, where he is the fiction editor of Crazyhorse.
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