TUESDAY JUNE 23, 7pm – POETRY
Moonstone Poetry Series Presents
MICHELE BELLUOMINI & DAN MAGUIRE

Michele Belluomini is a poet, storyteller, and librarian. Her work has been published in many journals, including Philadelphia Poets & The FoxChase Review among others, as well as in several anthologies – most recently, Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania. She has read in many places throughout the area, for the NJ Council on the Arts, and in New York. Her chapbook, Crazy Mary & Others was published by PlanB Press. For the last 15 years she has helped coordinate the Monday Poets series at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Dan Maguire’s poetry has won prizes and awards and has appeared in numerous anthologies and reviews. He has twice received first prize for poetry at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference and been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes. Poets Robert Bly and Gerald Stern have favorably reviewed his work. Finding the Words, Dan Maguire’s second collection of poetry, is suffused with atmosphere – hazy summer, smokey dusk, traffic-lit night. The poems, full of vivid imagery, evoke emotion, time, scents, and most importantly sound. Moments in time without language Maguire describes, somehow finding the words.

FRIDAY JUNE 19, 6pm – POETRY
C.A. CONRAD
author of Advanced Elvis Course ($12.95 Soft Skull Press)

CAConrad’s unabating love for the King has put him on a pilgrimage to Memphis on an advances ELVIS course. These bizarre, multi-faceted vignettes, conversations, and poems are an homage bursting with love, oddball white trash, and twisted sincerity. While he eats fried peanut butter banana sandwiches and chats up the locals, Conrad also imagines diverse and surreal scenarios about Elvis as the holy rock trinity: god, legend, and meat-loving southerner with a drug problem. These vignettes blur the distinction between real and fictional experience and become a transcendental portrait of the legendary Elvis: the man who changed music and America forever, perhaps with some illegitimate children along the way. Through sourced as disparate as graffiti, talk-show interviews, phone messages, and poetry, Conrad (whose unfettered energy doesn’t always feel that tied to reality) constructs a semi-mystical collage bursting with joy.

By taking the advanced ELVIS course, you will:
LEARN the not-so-subtle similarities between rock-and-roll and democracy.
HEAR Elvis talk dirty through television.
MEET colorful Graceland locals.
LOVE Elvis even if you’ve never heard a single song.
What do you mean you’ve never heard an Elvis song? No matter, Conrad will show you the way. Sign up for CAConrad’s advanced ELVIS course and learn how you too can bring a little more Elvis into your life.

CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006) and (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX Press, 2008). The Book of Frank (Chax Press) will be published in fall 2008 and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Press) will be published in 2009. Conrad invites you to visit him online at CAConrad.blogspot.com