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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Auntie’s evening: a pair of poets

Dan Webster

Poetry is on the schedule at Auntie's Bookstore tonight. Regional poets Kevin Goodan and Kimberly Burwick will read from their new collections at 7.

Goodan, a professor at Lewis-Clark State College, was raised with his stepfather and brothers on Montana's Flathead Indian Reservation. He will read from "Let the Voices," in which "the speaker in these poems gives voice to childhood companions often hungry, both literally and figuratively, for a kind of salvation. In a splicing of lyric and narrative vignettes language becomes both subject and catalyst for recovering one's voice in a negligent world."

Burwick, who teaches in the English Department at Washington State University, will read from "Good Night Brother." As one reviewer wrote, " 'Good Night Brother' opens a world of experience as distilled and compelling as anything Dickinson or Plath might render, in a music wrought from anguish. Poem after poem stops us short, not only for its sheer courage, its willingness to confront the raw truths of a ‘deformed’ relationship, but for its craft, its nuance, its impossible restraint."

The reading is free and open to the public.