Join us in celebrating the launch of The Entropy of Rocketman, a new collection of poems by Rita Anderson. Rita will be joined by writer Ray Shea.
The Entropy of Rocketman aligns the seasons of the heart with the four elements to take us on a tour de force through profound moments of joy, grief, and into the “in-between-ness of things” where humanity is reflected in stars that disappear.
“A classic lyric terrain of desire and loss creates the ground for the taut, smart poems in Rita Anderson’s The Entropy of Rocketman. With droll irony, Anderson describes love as a ‘noble gas’ (to be specific, the radioactive Uranium 238!), at once volatile and seductive; contemplates the ‘ancient need for more’; and returning imaginatively to explore the ‘old house’ (now empty but ‘still intact’) that love built, asks in a moment of wry paradox, ‘What if the undrawn line is the truest parameter, / one we cannot erase but would never cross?’ These poems shimmer with clarity, the deep and hard-won emotional wisdom that limns this brilliant collection.” —Cynthia Hogue, director, Creative Writing Program at ASU
Rita Anderson, a member of Poets & Writers, the Academy of American Poets, ICWP, and ScriptWorks, has a MFA Creative Writing and a MA Playwriting. A published and award-winning playwright and poet, Rita went on scholarship to The O’Neill. Her play, Frantic is the Carousel, was the 2013 National Partners American Theatre nominee, when she won the Kennedy Center’s Ken Ludwig Playwriting Award for “best body of work.” She’s had numerous productions to include NYC, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Detroit, Cincinnati—and in London, England and Paris, France. Early Liberty, internationally published at www.offthewallplays.com, is on their “Best Selling Plays” list. Rita was poetry editor of the literary journal at University of New Orleans. She won the Houston Poetry Festival, the Gerreighty Prize, the Robert F. Gibbons Poetry Award, the Cheyney Award, and an award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, EVENT Magazine (British Columbia), Blue Heron Review, Ellipsis, The Longleaf Pine (Midwood Press), DLC Literary Journal, Cahoodaloodaling, The Blueshift Journal, Blotterature, Words Work, Transcendence, PHIction, Persona (50th Anniversary Edition), The Artful Mind, Di-Verse-City: An Austin Poetry Anthology, Inflight Magazine (Paper Plane Pilots Publishing), The Stardust Gazette, and Explorations.
Ray Shea’s writing has appeared in The Southeast Review, Sundog Lit, The Austin Review, Hobart, Phoebe and elsewhere. He is a frequent contributor to The Rumpus and is Memoir Editor at Split Lip Magazine. A native of Boston and New Orleans, he lives in Austin.