Library Foundation of Los Angeles’ ALOUD Series Update
By Brian Dunlap
I received this email last week from the Library Foundation. It’s about the revamped ALOUD Reading Series. I know everybody in the Los Angeles literary community was upset last fall when the Library Foundation abruptly announced sudden changes to its staff–the firings of ALOUD Director Louise Steinman and Associate Director Maureen Moore–and to its central program, ALOUD, a program no one thought needed any retooling. However, major retooling has befallen ALOUD, and according to this email, very little, if any, literary programming is actually featured in any of its announced programming.
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A is for ACTION: A Social Justice Book Club for Kids at Eagle Rock Branch Library, LAPL – Kids Event
Believing in fate is a foundational part of my life, so when I was perusing my list of books to indulge in next, something called me to John Brantingham’s The Green of Sunset. For starters, I think it was the title. I hear sunsets get called everything but green, and this had me seeking out the elements of a sunset often unseen, like reading between the rays of a departing sun, and that’s something I needed this week.
Empathy & Heroism Book Club at Central Library, LAPL – Teen’Scape Event
Reading Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins’ Ablution, takes readers through the early days of love and beyond. Time passes, as it must. The narrative built within these poems, traverses the relationship between these lovers with a close lens, many titled with just a month and year. It feels too intimate at times, and readers might be compelled to look away, but that’s only a sign to keep reading.
Your Author Series & Ashlyn Anstee at Cahuenga Branch Library, LAPL – Kids Event
Like a hurricane of images, or a tsunami of grief, Sweeny’s lines strain against a background of stability and coherence that barely holds together. The book is an elegy not only because the title tells us so, but because it performs its elegiac ritual without the filter of conventional form or syntactical coherence. If grief is inchoate, the poet asks, what language is sufficient to the duty it is called upon to perform? The answer is a language suddenly released from its duties to inform or to persuade—functions of containment, framing, and interpretation—a non-syntax left to its singular capacity to conjure the ineffable, to bring it into being.
Los Angeles Literature 