WriterSpeak Series Presents
Press release
January 30, 2012
Contact:
Kevin Clark
kclark@calpoly.edu
756-2506
COURAGEOUS POET CORRINE HALES
TO READ FROM NEW BOOK
Illuminating her tough, often harrowing childhood as well as a complex relation to her former Mormon faith, nationally famous poet Corrine Clegg Hales will read from her new book of poems at 7:30PM on Tuesday February 21st in Room 231 of the Agriculture Building, directly across from the fire department on the Cal Poly campus.
Sponsored by the English Department and the Creative Writing program, the free reading is part of the WriterSpeak series.
Hales will read from To Make It Right, her much celebrated fifth book.
Cal Poly poet and professor Kevin Clark is particularly excited about Hale’s reading.
“Connie Hales is fearless. She’s one of the most exhilaratingly honest poets of our times,” said Clark. “She forges readily accessible, multi-layered, narrative poems about the realities of economic and spiritual hardship.”
“I know the audience will hang on every line while each poem narrates another tight poetic account of real people in dangerous situations,” he said.
A literature and creative writing professor at Fresno State, Hales is originally from Salt Lake City. Many of her poems have to do with the lives of blue collar women and children, and some are about her former Mormon faith.
As celebrated Iraq War poet Brian Turner says, Hales’ poems “refuse to avert their gaze….”
Poet and critic Claudia Emerson asserts that Hales’ new book owns “a fierce, undeniable beauty despite the hardships that have inspired it.”
Emerson goes on to praise the sustained ambition of the work, especially the “sequence devoted to the discovery of a narrative’s ‘first fine threads of truth’ buried with the victims of the Mountain Meadow Massacre of 1857, when Mormon zealots murdered over a hundred emigrants—men , women, and children—bound for California.”
The book reminds us, says Emerson,” that one of poetry’s noblest purposes lies in the skillful ordering of emotional chaos.”
Hales has earned two National Endowments for the Arts grants as well as the River Styx poetry prize.
To Make It Right will be on sale at the event.