September 25th: Stewart Florsheim Features

Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery (located on 106 Prospect Street in Cambridge) with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On September 25th, Stewart Florsheim visits Stone Soup while he visits the east coast to promote his new chapbook.

Stewart Florsheim was born in New York City, the son of refugees from Hitler's Germany. He has received several awards for his poetry and has been widely published in magazines and anthologies. He was the editor of Ghosts of the Holocaust, an anthology of poetry by children of Holocaust survivors (Wayne State University Press, 1989).

Florsheim's chapbooks include The Girl Eating Oysters (2River, 2004). and The Short Fall From Grace, printed by Blue Light Press this year after winning the Blue Light Book Award in 2005.

a technical writer by day, Florsheim also sits on the board of directors of Compassion and Choices of Northern California, an organization that helps the terminally ill make end-of-life decisions. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two daughters. A sample poem follows.


The Unseen

As the plane begins its descent into San Francisco
in thick cloud cover, the pilot says
And on your left is Yosemite, El Capitan.

My mother always hoped that what she had
was Lyme disease so she could give it a name,
imagine that it might be treatable.

The subject in Vermeer's Woman Reading a Letter
opens her lover's note quickly, then reads each line over and over
hoping that she might detect a change of heart.

We are compelled by what we can't see
so that we might be surprised
by the things we already know--

The one thought we prey upon,
not unlike the way a bat stalks a grasshopper,
swoops down, then misses.

--Stewart Florsheim

Visit Stewart Florsheim's website.