In Below Zero, her fourth poetry collection, Carol V. Davis explores Siberia, an area in Russia largely unknown to Americans. Flying into Ulan-Ude, capital of Buryatia Republic, where she had never been, she mutters a prayer that her plane will be met. On a trip to Lake Baikal, she and her colleagues drive past trees strung with Tibetan prayer ags and stop to drop rubles in the lap of a Buddha. In Irkutsk, when her host dips a finger in a glass of beer and taps it on the tabletop, “For the house spirits,” she thinks of her own Passover, “finger dipping in the wine.”
Intermingling faith practices, shamanistic rituals jostle with Russian Orthodox blessings. Amid a harsh life in winter “below zero,” the poet finds wonder and majesty in the vast landscape and the warmth of people who welcome her. These poems wander over borders, America to Russia, Los Angeles to Nebraska, from cities to tall grass prairie to forest. Faith and doubt, magic and superstition, place, cultures, and family history weave through this journey, inviting us to ask ourselves: Where do we belong and why?
Join author Carol V. Davis for a solo performance reading from her new collection in-person at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center.
Doors open: 7:00 pm, readings start: 7:15 pm
About the author
Carol V. Davis won the 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Her first book, It’s Time to Talk About..., was published in a bilingual English/Russian edition in 1997. Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the US Library of Congress, and Radio Russia. Formerly Poetry Editor of e Jewish Journal, she was the 2008 Sandburg-Auden-Stein Poet-in-Residence at Olivet College, MI, and teaches at Santa Monica College and Antioch University, Los Angeles. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Siberia, most recently in winter 2018. She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant for Siberia in 2020, postponed due to Covid, and then canceled in 2022 due to the war. Her work has been translated into German and Russian.
This event is Free & In-Person at Beyond Baroque. Masks are required while inside our center.
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