On Sunday, September 25, Baton Rouge Gallery’s Sundays@4 series is honored to welcome Lynne Jensen Lampe and Erin Little for a reading of recent poems.
Lynne Jensen Lampe was born in Newfoundland and raised mostly in Baton Rouge. Her poems appear in many print and online journals, including Figure 1, Yemassee, The American Journal of Poetry, One, and Rock & Sling, as well as SMEOP: Urban, a UK anthology. Her debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane, is out in September from Ice Floe Press (icefloepress.net). She was a finalist for the 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. Lynne lives with her husband and two dogs in Columbia, Missouri, where she edits academic books and journals. Visit her at https://lynnejensenlampe.com or Twitter @LJensenLampe.
Erin Little is the outgoing editor-in-chief of New Delta Review (ndrmag.org) and an MFA candidate studying poetry at Louisiana State University. Previously she was an editorial assistant at Penguin Random House in New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prelude Magazine, HAD, New Orleans Review, mutiny!, The Shore and Chestnut Review. Find her online at eringlittle.com.
Each artist will read and then invite readers for an open mic before the Q&A.
In her first collection, Lynne Jensen Lampe explores her relationship with her mother, her mother’s mental illness and postpartum issues, as well as gender and our still-limited knowledge of the mind. At the heart of Talk Smack to a Hurricane is a series of erasures created from pages of a letter Lynne’s mother wrote the day after giving birth. They tell of a new mother happy with life until an inexplicable mental shift sends her from maternity ward to psych ward—for a year, 2400 miles away. The other poems in the book expand on this history, examining faith, family heritage, anti-semitism, psychiatry, and life choices.
As poet Ed Skoog says, “The poetic imagination is only one of her tools for reaching into the past, along with photographs, letters on onionskin, erasure, research and tears.…The poems in this book are like spells cast against ghosts.” Talk Smack to a Hurricane fights notions of shame and stigma. The book offers up both tender and volatile moments, the daily fight for an ordinary life. It pays tribute to a complicated woman who loved her daughter.