Last night’s Brooklyn Reading Works was recorded by Hepcat with his nifty new Zoom recoring device and will be available soon for those who missed it as well as those who were there.

Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn was the featured book of the evening. Four poets who’s work appears in the book, Phillis Levin, Patricia Spears Jones, Tom Sleigh, and Michael Tyrell, read their poems as well as their favorites inside the book.

Everyone agreed that the collection, published by NYU Press, is an unusually strong representation of poems about Brooklyn. Tyrell revealed that he and his co-editor, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, tried to avoid nostalgic poems about Brooklyn, what they called knish poems.

Not that there’s anything wrong with poems about knishes.

The book includes contributions from the American poets commonly associated with Brooklyn like Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Marianne Moore-as well as memorable poems from Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff.

It also includes a wide range of contemporary works from both established and emerging poets: Derek Walcott, Galway Kinnell, C.K. Williams, Amy Clampitt, Martin Espada, Lisa Jarnot, Marilyn Hacker, Tom Sleigh, D. Nurkse, Donna Masini, Michael S. Harper, Noelle Kocot, Joshua Beckman, and many others.

Patricia Spears Jones read her poem, Halloween Weather (A Suite), as well as a poem by June Jordan called Grand Army Plaza.

Philis Levin did a beautiful reading of a Brooklyn poem by Frederico Garcia Lorca, as well as her own piece about the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She also read a startling poem called The Fire by a Croation poet named, Goran Tomcic.

In addition to his own poem, Tom Sleigh read poems by Hart Crane and Walt Whitman.

In his introduction to the evening, editor Tyrell spoke of the years he and his co-editor spent hunting and gathering poems for the book. He grew up on Manhattan Avenue and still lives in Greenpoint. He said the book was dedicated to Enid Dane, a Brooklyn poet of longstanding, who edited, Home Planet News, a Brooklyn literary tabloid “filled with poetry and gossip.” She died in 2003. Tyrell read his poem, “Against Angels” about St. Anthony’s Church in Greenpoint.

Phillis Levin read the last poem in the book, a beautiful poem called, After We Make Love by Melissa Beattie-Moss. Here’s the final stanza:

To comfort me, we lie in bed and talk of our three-year-old-son.
You’ve taught him his full name, address and number, to say
Brooklyn
correctly which he tries in his mouth again and again
Mommy, he says, it’s Baruch, Baruch-lyn, finding the Hebrew word Baruch
meaning Blessed in the old Dutch town of Brooklyn which you
remind me
also means a broken land

You can order Broken Land from the Community Bookstore (they may have it in stock).

The podcast will be available here and at Brooklyn Reading Works.

Don’t miss next month’s Brooklyn Reading Works on November 15th at 8 p.m. Poetry Punch with Lynn Chandhok, Michele Madigan Somerville, Zaedryn Meade, Cheryl B., and Marietta Abrams.

At the Old Stone House in JJ Byrne Park. 3rd Street and Fifth Avenue. For directions check the Old Stone House website.