There is something scary about the children’s games.
The neon hopscotch at dusk. The way
everything rhymes, or seems to.

Is this about you? It is about tenderness.
So, yes, perhaps.

*

NEW BOOK PARTY + MOVIE PREMIERE

PLEASE COME AND CELEBRATE THE PUBLICATION OF LEONARD GONTAREK’S NEW BOOK OF POEMS,TAKE YOUR HAND OUT OF MY POCKET, SHIVA,

AND THE PHILADELPHIA PREMIERE OF 14 PHOTOS FROM THE BRIDGE, THE AWARD-WINNING SHORT FILM BY LORI ERSOLMAZ BASED ON HIS POEM, SPONSORED BY MOTIONPOEMS AND THE WEISMAN ART MUSEUM

SIGNING & READING, WITH GUEST READERS

SEMI-FORMAL (OPTIONAL)

POPCORN WILL BE PROVIDED

FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 6 PM, 2016
PENN BOOKSTORE
3601 WALNUT STREET
PHILADELPHIA PA
(On the University of Pennsylvania Campus)

TAKE YOUR HAND OUT OF MY POCKET, SHIVA

(HANGING LOOSE PRESS, 2016)

“This is a book of human hungers so exact in its recognitions it leaves a reader stricken with a sense not just of how detailed our desires are, but how rare it is to have them articulated in ways yet unspoken. ‘In my poor country, we poured sugar/ on everything to not notice our hunger,’ Leonard Gontarek writes, but where that coat of sweetening fails, this poet stays to record what is still needed, what is still hungry, what is still so very, and beautifully, human.”

—Katie Ford, author of Blood Lyrics and Colosseum