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NEW Laurie participated in a group reading at Jack Straw Cultural Center
(Alumni Poetry Series) on Wednesday, 12 June 2024 from 7 to 9
pm. Others readers included Leanne Dunic, Michael Magee, Shin Yu
Pai, Sylvia Byrne Pollack, and Molly Tenenbaum. NEW Laurie was recently mentioned in a Seattle Times article: A look inside Seattle’s flourishing poetry scene.
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Laurie Blauner
Laurie Blauner is the author of nine books of poetry, five novels, and a hybrid nonfiction collection. She received an MFA from The University of Montana. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in various publications, including The New Republic, The Nation, The Georgia Review, The Seattle Review, The New Orleans Review, Poetry, and American Poetry Review. She has received an NEA grant, King County Arts Commission, Seattle Arts Commission, Artist Trust, and Centrum grants and awards. Laurie Blauner lives in Seattle, Washington.
Interviews / Go here to read articles about Laurie or listen to interviews with Laurie.
Fiction
Out of Which Came Nothing, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2021
The Solace of Monsters, Leapfrog Press, 2016
The Bohemians, Black Heron Press, 2013
Instructions for Living, Main Street Rag,
2011
Infinite Kindness, Black Heron Press, 2007
Somebody, Black Heron Press, 2003
Nonfiction
I Was One of My Memories, PANK Books, 2022
Poetry
Come Closer, Bitter Oleander Press, 2023
A Theory for What Just Happened, FutureCycle Press, 2021
It Looks Worse than I Am, What Books Press, 2014
Figments (& other occurrences), dancing girl press, 2013
Wrong, Cherry Grove Collections, 2008
All This Could Be Yours, Cherry Grove Collections, 2006
Facing the Facts, Orchises Press, 2002
Children of Gravity, Owl Creek Press, 1995
Self-Portrait with an Unwilling Landscape, Owl Creek Press, 1989
Other Lives, Owl
Creek Press, 1984
Sample prose poetry
The Unsaid
Those are my people, the ones who worship someone broken
in another room, my mother said before and after. Her interior lining was frayed. She was pointing incoherently at framed
portraits pinned above her large wooden baroque dining room table, surrounded
by a manifesto of chairs.
My beautiful mother rehearsed her analogies. You have mere fragments of our ancestors
in that cave you call a body, she chided me, dramatically raising her
hand to her forehead to form a human visor.
I peered at the general shape of my skin, my limbs alive and
directed by muscles, curling into themselves.
My face and dark hair were different from those paintings and
photographs before my time. I couldn’t
recall anyone, having never met them.
Mother’s Mahjong tiles, with their abstract symbols, clicked
endlessly as I hid inside her. I was the
victim of numerous cucumber sandwiches and cigarette smoke that coiled in the
unfettered air, then clothed the players.
Her pipes were clanging. I didn’t
live where I should have, at first. The
rumble of her words echoed in my mouth.
My little cocoon, my father cooed as he passed all
the women at the table. He patted her
shoulder with his hand that wasn’t holding a drink aloft. Keep on winning so our little family can
move to a larger house. He laughed,
liquor staining his hope.
My mother was losing, to a younger woman whose shade of red
lipstick dotted my father’s stiff collars.
She began misplacing her purse, jangling keys, forgoing card games. She was being reabsorbed.
Father approached the table happily, setting fresh drinks
down in front of the women. The glasses
cried in the heat. He kissed my
distracted mother’s shellacked blonde hair.
A tile fell sideways when she looked away. Drink, my little mouse.
She wanted to scoop out everything inside.
I watched intently as our refrigerator continued
buzzing. I could barely reach the cold,
curved handle, but I pondered whether the noise and light had affected our
food. Father left us last year for the
younger woman. All our appliances seemed
to be falling apart.
Are you praying to an electrical apparatus? mother
asked as she slipped past the gadget full of food and my yellow kitchen chair
that held and comforted me. She was
wearing a sequin party dress that scattered light across the refrigerator door. Her velvet high heels clicked on our cheap
linoleum.
I miss him. My
little voice didn’t mean much.
She ignored me, peered at her reflection blossoming in a
mirror. I poured her a drink, exactly
the way she liked it, to the brim, clear and bitter. She drank it in three gulps. She fixed the blonde fountain of her
hair. She smiled at herself, showing her
white teeth. My teeth were crooked and
rotten. Don’t worry. I’ll find you another father.
I want mine. I
sniveled but the refrigerator was louder.
As I grew older, I began talking to my drinks, which
understood me better than mother or father.
I don’t have any history, I lied to one with something blue and
swirling in it as though it was winking at me.
It’s just you and me, Babe.
I winked back. I did things with
people I immediately forgot.
It was my recently dead father, with his enormous nose and
thin lips who introduced me to the linings of my expansive night dreams. He seemed to be saying, Don’t worry about
your mother or her imagined family.
Life is a rehearsal.
For what? I asked him from my sleep, which felt as
though it could encompass everyone else.
Copyright 2017-2024 Laurie Blauner, all rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction
by any means strictly prohibited.