divebarwife:

After all of the "suburbs vs. city" brouhaha surrounding the Rose Festival events of the past two weeks - I decided that on this Monday morning I am going to give our suburban neighbors some love.

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Corrine Fitzpatrick read with Geneva Chao two Wednesdays ago in North Portland. (Janet and Kate will be glad to hear the Concordia now rolls out a flashing mothership of a PA head to mike the barbaric yawp.)

Geneva Chao's work was new to me, though it sounds like we overlapped in San Francisco, where she has a new chapbook coming out with Suzanne Stein's Oakland-based TAXT Press. Chao opened by reminding us it was the anniversary of the King assassination; she asked how many of us knew that date, like her, from U2. (At first I thought she said 'YouTube,' like TMZ had a clip up or something, which shows what high-speed Internet's done for me.) Her work, too, seemed to push serious political content through the confetti shredder of pop culture; "politics like pixie sticks" sweetened for emergency distribution to the masses.

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