Joseph Bathanti
Joseph Bathanti is former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the 2016 North Carolina Award for Literature. He is the author of seventeen books, including The 13th Sunday after Pentecost, a volume of poems, released by LSU Press in late 2016; and the novel, The Life of the World to Come, from University of South Carolina Press in 2014. Bathanti is Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University.
Reading List
Huntersville Prison: Winter, Early Lockdown
(after the photograph by Alan Kincaid) They’re still sitting there, doing time, in the cellblock – convict-cut and canted quarry rock from the Depression – after evening chow, at the picnic table, until lights out. Shutter-stilled, forty years ago, in …
Concertina
Alias razor wire, fashioned after the free-reed, bellows-drive instrument, patented in 1884 by Sir Charles Wheatstone. Early in its history, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee was arranged for English concertina. Used as ramparts in WWI. You’ve seen archival photographs of …
Rita’s Dream
My mother had a dream about her father, Federico Schiaretta, immolated in the suspect fire, well before my birth, that destroyed his Station Street cobbler’s shop. It was custom, almost liturgical, among Italians in East Liberty to summon a bookie …
Robert Lowell
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O, and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair. — Robert Lowell, …