
A Free Monthly Online Reading Series from Writing Workshops Dallas & Gemini Ink
(Zoom Meetings Monthly @ 7pm CST; RSVP for Zoom invite)

July 20th, 2022 via Zoom @ 7PM CST
Up Next: We’re reading and discussing Alexandra van de Kamp’s poetry collection, Ricochet Script.
ABOUT RICOCHET SCRIPT
Alexandra van de Kamp’s Ricochet Script examines life as a plot slipping from our hands, veering in unexpected directions as years coalesce behind us. These poems bargain with time as a foreign, surreal, and elusive entity, where whole days can feel as if they were “written/in someone else’s script.” In vivid, at times playful musings, van de Kamp grapples with midlife, loss, and the strangeness of the body, while never forgetting the unrelenting beauty of being alive. These poems invoke a wide range of storylines, from Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and spy thrillers to aging parents, to confront the unpredictable and ricocheting world.
Alexandra van de Kamp tells us “I want to make sense of abundance.” In her beautifully wrought poems, we experience the sheer delight of all the sights, smells, and sounds of this world. Yet few poets are as deft at simultaneously evoking the precarity and consequent tenderness of existence. Van de Kamp’s is a world made magical through art. She is canny, funny, filmic, but she can also stop your heart with the sudden apprehension of how time moves through us, “coaxing us / to bear something so much larger than ourselves.” Ricochet Script is the book we need in these challenging times, a book that quite simply teaches us how to live more fully.
–Sheila Black, co-editor of Beauty is a Verb, author of Iron Ardent
This poet is a lithe acrobat, her ricocheting thoughts tightly woven by stunning images. The poems think, yet the movement is concrete, specific, tuned with details: “. . . watch the bright / balled-up leaves in the boiled water unfurl and float, / like mini-Ester Williams doing the backstroke.” Or “. . . let’s not forget the invisible; / the mosquito the size of a torn // eyelash . . .” The poems in Ricochet Script decry and bless the human condition. Alexandra van de Kamp’s use of irony, pathos to describe inner and outer worlds, and her close investigation of mortality brings us a book to savor, to read slowly, expectations raised to the excitement and beauty of what is next.
–Veronica Golos, author of GIRL
In the atmospheric Ricochet Script, poems are rendered not only in the high contrast of film noir, but in the flesh tones of unmediated raw material—the body and the life gathered around it. The powerful “Elegy to My Uterus with a Glass of Pinot Noir” blends the cinematic and the body effortlessly in its opening lines: “When they told me you had to go, / I envisioned myself on a train in a 1950s European war film, staring out / at a country I’d never see again.” Throughout Ricochet Script, Alexandra van de Kamp takes delight in the tools of her trade. Language shimmers with meaning and eroticism, words themselves become “rounded and ridged morsels.” While the mood sometimes darkens, the voice of these entrancing poems remains sophisticated, ardent, witty, and passionate.
–Stephanie Dickinson, author of Blue Swan Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries
ABOUT ALEXANDRA VAN DE KAMP
Alexandra van de Kamp is the Executive Director for Gemini Ink, San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center (www.geminiink.org). Her most recent book of poems is Ricochet Script, recently released by Next Page Press on April 1, 2022. Previous collections of poems include: Kiss/Hierarchy (Rain Mountain Press 2016) and The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (CW Books 2010). She has also published several chapbooks, including A Liquid Bird Inside the Night (Red Glass Books 2015) and Dear Jean Seberg (2011), which won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Her poems have been published in journals nationwide, such as The Cincinnati Review, The Texas Observer, Denver Quarterly, Great Weather for MEDIA, Washington Square, 32Poems, Tahoma Literary Review, and Sweet: A Literary Confection. She has had her work featured on VerseDaily and her poetry has received Best of the Net nominations and more. Find out more about her poetry here.
UPCOMING AUTHORS AND TITLES
August 17: Laurie Ann Guerrero, I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake
Sept 14: Carmen Tafolla and Regina Moya, The Last Butterfly/La Ultima Mariposa
Oct 19: Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau
Nov 16: Daniel Peña, Bang: A Novel
Dec 14:Tomás Q. Morin, Let Me Count the Ways
PREVIOUS AUTHORS AND TITLES
Wondra Chang, Sonju
Johnnie Bernhard, Sisters of the Undertow
Barbara Ras,The Blues of Heaven
Mike Soto, A Grave is Given Supper
Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8
Marisol Cortez, Luz At Midnight
Sergio Troncoso, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son
Edward Vidaurre, Pandemia & Other Poems
Octavio Quintanilla, If I Go Missing
Sherry Kafka Wagner, Hannah Jackson
Nan Cuba, Body and Bread
Cliff Hudder, Pretty Enough for You
Rebekah Manley, Alexandra and the Awful, Awkward, No Fun, Truly Bad Dates A Picture Book Parody for Adults
Jenny Browne, Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems (TCU Poet Laureate Series)
Amanda Eyre Ward, The Jetsetters
Heather Harper Ellett, Ain’t Nobody Nobody.
Andrea Vocab Sanderson, She Lives in Music
Antonio Ruiz-Camacho: Barefoot Dogs
Poet Wendy Barker: Gloss
Debut Novelist Fowzia Karimi: Above Us the Milky Way
Edgar-winning novelist Joe R. Lansdale: Edge of Dark Water
Winner of the Iowa Prize for Nonfiction Kendra Allen: When You Learn the Alphabet
2020 Texas Poet Laureate Emmy Pérez: With The River on Our Face
New York Times Bestselling Author Kathleen Kent: The Dime & The Burn
Critically Acclaimed Novelist David Samuel Levinson: Tell Me How This Ends Well
