Kate Schapira MFA'06, visiting lecturer in English, entranced listeners with her stark, evocative poetry at the Brown Bookstore yesterday evening.
Her poems — which came from two recently released poetry collections, "The Bounty: Four Addresses" and "How We Saved The City" — are meditative deconstructions of the world around us. Each of her poems feels like a body torn apart that yearns to be reassembled. Images function as organs, removed from their original context and then pieced together into breathing, living units. Words work like cells, each one building upon the next in intricate, alternating layers of meaning.
Schapira said she started writing "The Bounty" in 2007 on her daily bus commutes between the four colleges where she taught. The book is composed of four sections Schapira calls "addresses" — "You're a stranger," "You're my sister," "You do damage" and "I catch myself."
Each address consists of a variety of richly rendered musings on human relationships and life in general. Schapira narrates her pieces in a visceral style of poetry-prose that tries to provoke readers into finding connections between contrasting objects and relationships. Many of the poems in the collection rely on imagery from human anatomy. The first line in the book attests to Schapira's contemplative use of the body in this way. "Pink and blue sky like a tissue sample," she writes.
"How We Saved The City," on the other hand, is a much more diverse aggregation of observations, framed by a wide spectrum of poetry and prose. The earliest pieces in the collection are from 2003, when Schapira first moved to Providence. The city provided the majority of inspiration for the poems in the book.
"Providence is a very weird city because it's very economically segregated and very small," Schapira said. "Different neighborhoods and people live slap next door to each other."
Schapira attributed the development of her poetic style to her studies at Brown. "At the program, I got to work with really great writers, who were all my peers and teachers," she said. "You can see flavors of all these people in my work."
By turns contemplative, accusative and transcendental, Schapira's collections excavate the hidden depths of the city and society in which she resides.
