Rooftop Poetry Club - Ellis Avery

Ellis Avery

Bio:
Ellis Avery is the author of THE TEAHOUSE FIRE, a novel set in the tea ceremony world of 19th century Kyoto, due out this winter from Riverhead Books, and THE SMOKE WEEK, a prose-poem account of post 9/11 Manhattan (Gival Press 2003). Please visit ellisavery.com for samples.

Sample:

A prose poems from THE SMOKE WEEK:

Once Upon a Time
Summer, 1996

I moved here five years ago with two friends, Jan and Janna. In love
with our new lives, we took the subway up to the Cloisters and down to
Battery Park. We took the dangling tram across the river to Roosevelt
Island, we kayaked the Hudson, we walked the Brooklyn Bridge.

We took the elevator to the top of the World Trade Center one night.
There was a place you could look out the window for free. The world we
saw was black and blue and gold, wedges and columns of bright window
and dark steel. Small but visible night-shift men and
women worked at their desks, framed and lit like Byzantine saints.

The buildings blazed upward, lit the sky and one another, aloft. Far
below, we saw tiny streets, the very names of which?in a gridded city
of numbered blocks and avenues?seemed dim, threadlike, Dickensian: Old
Slip, Coenties Slip, Thames, Vesey,
Gouverneur, Maiden Lane. From above, at night, they formed a dark
filigree, a patina in which the luminous towers burned all the
brighter.

The whole thing made us limp with pleasure. When we'd had our fill, we
took the elevator down, looking up at the mirrored ceiling and twirling
in circles, arms out. And each of us in her own way said this prayer to
the city we had seen: Ravish my heart. Take me with you.