The Writers' Collective

Tuesday, June 7 @ 7 @ Aqua (of course)

Featured Reader Maurice Mierau

Aqua Books is pleased to be the permanent home of the venerable poetry series Speaking Crow. The Crow starts at 7pm and is followed by two open-mic sets and short breaks in between. Come take up the mic and wax poetic about life, the universe and everything!

Maurice Mierau is the author of two books of poetry: Ending with Music (Brick Books, 2002) and Fear Not (Turnstone Press, 2008).

Mierau’s work exemplifies a bitter illustration of and a desperate railing against a fallen human world filled with catastrophic violence. His powerful poems, ofttimes lyric but also given to being conceptual, set up a negotiation between some of humanity’s most lucid or compassionate philosophies and those most unhappy or ungovernable emotions (our want to hurt others; our urge to revenge; our lust to greed). What is presented throughout is a desire to muck defiantly through human harms toward a state of living in dignity and peaceably.

Mierau’s tactics include lightning-swift changes in viewpoint, location, and tone, so the poems are often a rough ride into defamiliarization and grotesque equivalences and terrifying emotional shifts. This all sounds rather horrific and grim, but the truth is that it is often very funny (O how our bruises glow, peach-like!). A loving sadness is often Mierau’s optic. A difficult faith is lived out.

The satanic impertinence that is Fear Not won the prestigious (though penniless, unfortunately) ReLit award for poetry in 2009.

His current projects include a manuscript of form-based poetry titled Six (wherein sestinas, glosas, ghazals, and other things), and a memoir of childhood in three generations. He is also the editor for the new online magazine The Winnipeg Review.