Poetry. EVEN THE JAVA SPARROWS CALL YOUR HAIR is a bright book amidst dark times. Witness a young woman birthing a perfectly oval egg or learn the ropes of the Wang Wei Board Game, taking on the role of a lute or a panda chewing bamboo. Kalamaras's electric poems move delicately between Eastern mystic thought, surrealism, and meditations on the human body and soul. They suggest that the body's true spiritual worth can be discovered in its connectivity with the universe, alighting a pony on the tongue or an ascending angel out of the spine: His quieter musings work not so much as to question, but to point out a direction of understanding: "When you pull the earth apart to plant iris bulbs, what is that purple bending at the back of your throat? What bird sings in the Chinese elm with your vocal chords and the step of your weight that leaves traces of threatening sky on pointed leaves?"
Author Hometown: FORT WAYNE, IN USA
About the author: George Kalamaras is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990. He is the author of several books of poetry, including KINGDOM OF THROAT-STRUCK LUCK (Elixir Press, 2011), Your Own Ox-Head Mask as Proof (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), GOLD CARP JACK FRUIT MIRRORS (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2008), EVEN THE JAVA SPARROWS CALL YOUR HAIR (Quale Press, 2004), BORDERS MY BENT TOWARD (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), and THE RECUMBENT GALAXY (C&R Press, 2010), co-authored with Alvaro Cardona-Hine. He is the recipient of Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993) and the Indiana Arts Commission (2001 and 2011). During 1994, he spent several months in India on an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship from the Fulbright Foundation and the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture. After living many years with their beagle, Barney, George and his wife, writer Mary Ann Cain, have welcomed a new beagle pup, Bootsie, into their home. They live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and regularly return to northern Colorado, where George and Mary Ann lived for several years in the 1980s.
