An Evening of Noir Poetry | North Beach

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Karyna McGlynn reading from I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl published by Sarabande Books, and Donna de la Perrière reading from True Crime published by Talisman House.

Karyna McGlynn’s I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues—frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse’s eye, dripping window units, an aneurysm opening its lethal trap. In otherworldly vignettes, 1994 pairs the unreliable narration of Jacob’s Ladder (with its questions of identity and shifting realities) with the microscopic compulsiveness of Einstein’s Dreams. The book’s sense of hypnotic premeditation brings Donnie Darko to mind as well, as poem after poem scatters the breadcrumbs of a murder mystery leading us further away from the present self and deeper into the past. I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is an astounding debut collection that will crawl under your skin and stay there.

Donna de la Perrière is the recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry award. Her work has appeared in Agni, American Letters and Commentary, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Five Fingers Review, First Intensity, Interim, The New England Review, New American Writing, Parthenon West Review, Talisman, Volt, Xantippe, and other journals, as well as Faux Press’s Bay Poetics anthology. She curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series every summer at The Lab, a gallery and performance space located in San Francisco.

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