The Elliott Bay Book Company

--PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE FOR THIS EVENT!--

Seattle poet Laura McKee, a University of Washington MFA graduate, a recipient of awards from the Seattle Arts Commission and the Jackstraw Foundation along the way, reads tonight from her recently published debut collection, Uttermost Paradise Place (The American Poetry Review). This book is itself a prize—chosen for the prestigious APR/Honickman First Book Prize. "... the poems in Uttermost Paradise Place achieve transparency. While many of them are perceived via a persona, it is ultimately the personae of perception itself that proscribes the pure pleasure of reading ... Charting a humor of consequence—hell is perpetually in this book and it is the Greek hell, where re-birth occurs—Laura McKee creates a poetics of call and response, but not in the traditional sense, as in poet to reader, chorus leader to singers, etc. These poems call to each other, syllable by syllable, and they are so pleased with the circuitry of sound and sense that readers—if they just give themselves away to the pleasure of being exactly nowhere but in the unscripted place all authentic poetry provides—will experience the paradise the book proposes." – Claudia Keelan, from the Introduction.