Ring in National Poetry Month (April) by joining us for a reading and discussion with two poets - JP DiBlasi and Rooja Mohassessy. JP lives locally and has a collection of poems in our store, No Longer Gravity’s Partner. Rooja hails from Iran by way of the West Coast and has recently published her memoir in verse form: When Your Sky Runs Into Mine.
Both books will be available for purchase and signing following the reading.
This event is free, but we hope you’ll help us plan by RSVP’ing here.
About Rooja Mohassessy
Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator living in Northern California. Her ekphrastic memoir-in-verse, When Your Sky Runs Into Mine, which spans three continents and four decades, won the Elixir Poetry Award and was released by the press last month. The poems are inspired by the art of the Iranian painter and sculptor, Bahman Mohassess and provide a first-hand context to the ongoing women-led revolution in Iran. They explore themes of belonging, the female body, loss, and the reclaiming of voice and agency.
When Your Sky Runs Into Mine is a stunning debut collection. Set against childhood in the post-revolutionary Iran of the 1980s and coming of age as an American immigrant, the poems are an intricate ekphrastic dance where the poet embodies the roles of women, and decides, “It’s time to come to terms / with the dark” ––the dark of the chador, the dark of the hijab, of blackouts during bombing, of immigrant guilt for family left behind. This collection is also about personal revolution, the turning toward art in times of suffering, the claiming of a rich cultural heritage.
—Ellen Bass author of Indigo
Rooja is a MacDowell fellow and a graduate of the Pacific University MFA program. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Bare Life Review, Potomac Review, The Florida Review, New Letters, International Literary Quarterly, and elsewhere.
About JP DiBlasi
JP DiBlasi is a native New Yorker who lives and writes in the Hudson River town of Ossining, NY. Her poems have been published in Never Forgotten 100 Poets Remember 911, North Sea Poetry Scene Press 2021: “Free Fall,” “Loved Ones,” Carrying The Branch: Poets in Search of Peace, Glass Lyre Press, 2017: “Au Nom de Pere,” Chronogram, Poetry Breakfast and RiverRiver. Her chapbook, No Longer Gravity’s Partner, Blue Light Press, was published in 2019. JP is retired from the field of social work having been a member of the executive staff of a large children’s mental health agency where she was responsible for their programs in the Bronx, NY. JP is interested in traditional Irish music, attends local music sessions and teaches the bodhrán, the Irish goat skin drum. Friends love her sense of humor.
No Longer Gravity’s Partner is a small collection of poems that seek understanding and meaning, both the small and the large, that are hidden in the ordinary. They are the things experienced every day by people looking for answers to what are often called the “mysteries of life.” The poems in this collection probe the reader to enter into a dialog between themselves and others through the images and shadows cast by nature, loss, and small doses of humor.
“DiBlasi’s poems are not to be read hurriedly, or without commitment. They deserve to be savored, absorbed and allowed to dwell in the subconscious . . . May we all break ties with gravity! These poems are a good jumping-off place.”
—Jo-Ellen C. Bosson, Author of Fiona’s Song, and Wild and Free; the Story of A Black-Footed Ferret