The opening reception for Jeremiah: ha'aretz - an installation for FENTSTER featuring new work by Simon Glass, exhibited publicly for the first time.
Transcribing golden Hebrew letters for the word "ha'aretz" (the land) onto vintage airplane doors, Glass suggests a bird's-eye view, reinterpreting the bleak and barren landscape described by the prophet Jeremiah as filled with the potential for healing.
Artist talk at 7:30 PM followed by Poets on Jeremiah: Poet David Goldstein reads from his own work as well as from the book-length poem Jeremiah, Ohio by his friend and colleague Adam Sol, which reimagines the Biblical prophet as a present-day preacher on a reeling road trip through the strip malls and back roads of the United States.
Light refreshments will be served. Kashrut observed.
ABOUT OUR OPENING EVENT GUEST & FEATURED BOOK:
DAVID B. GOLDSTEIN is the author of two poetry collections, Lost Originals and Laws of Rest, both published by BookThug. His most recent chapbook is Object Permanence (Ugly Duckling). Goldstein’s first scholarly book, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge, 2013) won the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award. He lives with his family in Toronto, where he is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at York University.
In Jeremiah, Ohio (Anansi, 2008) Adam Sol reinvents the Biblical prophet and doomsayer Jeremiah for the postmodern age, and sends him on a reeling road trip through the strip malls and back roads of the United States with an ordinary, everyman companion, Bruce. The mismatched pair are thrown together by accident, but come to value each other as they travel in early September toward the promised city of New York.The verse in this ambitious, politically charged, and beautiful book alternates between the two main characters -- while Jeremiah delivers strange, super-charged prophecies full of incendiary language and deliberately mixed metaphors, Bruce offers down-to-earth catalogues of mundane details and daily struggles in the American empire. With these inspired creations, Adam Sol fully delivers the mastery of language and subtlety of insight promised in his earlier work. Short-listed for the Trillium Book Award 2009