The Third Massachusetts Poetry Festival is delighted to start releasing the names of participating poets and musicians. Each week we will announce the names of some of the participants. Today we are proud to announce that on Friday evening , May 13th,  the first headline reading will feature Brian Turner, Aimee Nezhukumatathil  and  Jericho Brown, along with local poets and musicians.

 Brian Turner won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet, (Alice James Books) the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize[2] is Phantom Noise (Alice James Books, 2010).

Turner served seven years in the US Army, including one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000.Turner’s poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. Turner was also featured in Operation Homecoming, a unique documentary that explores the firsthand accounts of American servicemen and women through their own words.

 Watch Brian Turner read “Here, Bullet.”

See other poems by Turner below.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three poetry collections: LUCKY FISH; AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO, winner of the Balcones Prize for the best collection of poetry published in 2007; and MIRACLE FRUIT, winner of the Tupelo Press Prize, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award, and the Global Filipino Award. Her writing has been published in several anthologies and was awarded an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and the Pushcart Prize. Camille Dungy wrote that Lucky Fish“demonstrates an exciting range, dexterity and playful fierceness.   These poems have fun with language, with the very idea of what poetry can be doing.  Even as she takes on the subjects of love and longing, the distances between who we are and who we hope to be, the poems are unabashedly joyful.” Nezhukumatathil is associate professor of English at the State University of New York-Fredonia where she won the SUNY Chancellor’s Medal of Excellence for Scholarship and Creative Activities. 

Watch Aimee Nezhukumatathil read “Oriental.”

See other poems by Nezhukumatathil below.

Brian Turner poems

The  Mutanabbi  Street  Bombing

March 5, 2007

In the moment after the explosion, an old man
staggers in the cloud of dust and debris, hands
pressed hard against bleeding ears
as if to block out the noise of the world
at 11:40 a.m., the broken sounds of the wounded
rising around him, roughened by pain.

Buildings catch fire. Cafes.
Stationery shops. The Renaissance Bookstore.
A huge column of smoke, a black anvil head
pluming upward, fueled by the Kitah al-Aghani,
al-Isfahani’s Book of Songs, the elegies of Khansa,
the exile poetry of Youssef and al-Azzawi,
religious tracts, manifestos, translations
of Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Neruda—
these book-leaves curl in the fire’s
blue-tipped heat, and the long centuries
handed down from one person to another, verse
by verse, rise over Baghdad.

As the weeks pass by, sunsets
deepen in color over the Pacific. Couples
lie in the spring fields of California,
drinking wine, making love in the lavender
dusk. There is a sweet, apple-roasted
smell of tobacco where they sleep.
They dream. Then wake to the dawn’s
early field of lupine—to discover themselves
dusted in ash, the poems of Sulma
and Sayyab in their hair, Sa’di on their eyebrows,
Hafiz and Rumi on their lips.

In memory of Mohammed Hayawi

The Whale

It is 1970
                     and the summer of love is over.

I am three years old, barefoot,
         running along the surf
near Florence, Oregon,

where an eight-ton sperm whale
     beached itself and died, the carcass
rotting now,
                    an entrance carved into its massive flank
for cases of dynamite, 500 pounds of explosives
        necessary to rend open the interior
so scavengers can pick the skeleton clean—

but for me, it is the doorway to another world,
       the body of the sacred I might enter into,
its eyes drained of all but a giant benevolence,
      flukes wide as the tail fins of bombers
           overhead, my mother

hoisting me to her hip as engineers argue
    blasting caps and stand-off distance,
equations to undo the intricate puzzle
    of muscle and bone —
                                         the way life waits for us all
            with great patience, the electrons orbiting
in their shells like distant planets we never see,
    the constellations which bind the universe
undone this day, at least for this one body
        beached on the sand as we witness the blast
from the sawgrass dunes,
                                          the sudden
    jolt of nerves as the body absorbs
the shockwave, beach-sand shot upward
       in jets of tissue and meat,
the local news reporter dropping to his knees
        to cover his head with a clipboard
  while the cameraman does the same,
my mother shielding me with her torso
       turned away from the blast
    and I remember everyone smiling
afterward, laughing, each of us amazed
       the day a god was blown to pieces on the beach
           and we all walked away from it, unscathed.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems

Love in the Orangery

When you see a seventy-pound octopus squeeze
through a hole the size of a half-dollar coin, you

finally understand that everything you learn about
the sea will only make people you love say You lie.

There are land truths that scare me: a purple orchid
that only blooms underground. A German poet

buried in the heart of an oak tree. The lighthouse man
who used to walk around the streets at night

with a lighted candle stuck into his skull. But winters
in Florida—all the street corners have sad fruit

tucked into the curb, fallen from orangery truckers
who take corners too fast. The air is sick with citrus

and yet you love the small spots of orange in walls
of leafy green as we drive. Your love is a concrete canoe

that floats in the lake like a lead balloon, improbable
as a steel wool cloud, a metal feather. This is the truth:

I once believed nothing on earth could make me say magic.
You believe in the orange blossom tucked behind my ear.

Eclipse

           for Pascal

 She’s been warned not to sleep with moonlight
on her face or she will be taken from her house.

 She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts
her face to the night sky when no one is looking.
During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark

 and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures
just outside of town, surrounding the dumb cows

in a wet mess of croak and sizzle. Years later,
she would touch the hand of a green-eyed man
by the weird light. Because of him, she plants

a moon garden: freesia, snowdrops, fotherfilla,
bugbane. She is a runner-bean, stretching best

 and brilliant in this light. Their child is moon-faced.
She is crazy about them. She is lunatic. She
is taken. She is a hymn book flipped open.

Jericho Brown’s poems

The Burning Bush

Lizard’s shade turned torch, what thorns I bore
Nomadic shepherds clipped. Still,
I’ve stood, a soldier listening for the word,
Attack, a prophet praying any ember be spoken
Through me in this desert full of fugitives.
Now, I have a voice. Entered, I am lit. 
Remember me for this sprouting fire,
For the lash of flaming tongues that lick
But do not swallow my leaves, my flimsy
Branches. No ash behind, I burn to bloom. 
I am not consumed. I am not consumed.