Chaucer’s Books in Santa Barbara will host poets David Starkey (“You, Caravaggio”) and Catherine Abbey Hodges (“Empty Me Full”) for a reading and book signing 6 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 10.
Starkey’s “You, Caravaggio” is a biography in poems of the great Italian painter. Writing about the book, Carrie Patterson, editor of the Nomadic Journal, said:
“The unanswered questions about Caravaggio’s life, the silences and darkness, are manifest through Starkey’s curiosity and vivid rendering, a biography befitting both the dramatic arc of the painter’s life and our yearning relationship to art and to history,”
Fellow poet Barbara Rockman, said Hodges’ new collection of poems “Empty Me Full” is “an invitation to intimate conversation with a wise and affectionate seeker. Here is a wit-laced and vulnerable wondering. In poems that turn grief to awe and sadness to wonder, the poet celebrates our stunning, imperfect lives.”
Starkey served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-11 poet laureate. Emeritus professor and founding director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College, he is currently co-editor of Anacapa Review and The California Review of Books, and publisher and co-editor of Gunpowder Press.
More than 500 of his poems have been published in English-language journals around the world. His most recent book of poetry is “You, Caravaggio,” with another, “The Moon Shall Not Give Her Light,” due out in January.
Hodges, whose latest book is “Empty Me Full,” is also the author of “Instead of Sadness” (2015) and “Raft of Days” (2017).
Hodges was the winner of the inaugural Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in venues including The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, Connotation Press, Cider Press Review and Canary. Hodges’ poems have been featured on Writer’s Almanac.
“All the While,” a chapbook from Finishing Line Press, was a finalist in the New Women’s Voices contest.
A native of Santa Barbara, Hodges is an emeritus professor of English at Porterville College in California’s San Joaquin Valley.