A vision emerges unbidden, seemingly delivered not from inside the mind, but from outside, as though from the gods, or the God, arriving through some superhuman or supernatural force, an offering to the inner eye. In 12th century Germany, Hildegard of Bingen, mystic, writer, composer, philosopher, began having visions when she was three years old. In “And Again I Heard the Stars” (Spuyten Devil), a pulsing and sensual debut poetry collection, Somerville-based poet Christie Towers intertwines with Hildegard, bringing language from Hildegard’s visions into the poems, conjuring something alive and new. These are poems of, above all, wanting, of desire and yearning, and the flames that define the feeling, sometimes smoldering warm and low, sometimes burning bright and hot: “provoked swollen or intensified red / luminosity a strong feeling a quickening / arousal a source of illumination.” Towers’s lines are grounded in “a body entire,” and she treads the thread between the flesh, its heated presence, and the ecstatic, the joining — or the desire to join — with something or someone outside yourself. “I speak as one / in doubt taught inwardly great / secrets,” Towers writes. There is an abiding not-knowing, a sense of question, and “the restraint of flesh / this burning perversity.” Towers wonders what arises from the heat of not having, not knowing, and her answers are powerfully erotic, charged with the touch of feathers and stars. Towers will read from her work, with poet Aly Pierce, this Wednesday, July 27 at 7 pm at Porter Square Books in Cambridge.
The book business in Boston is booming. Harvard Book Store, the mighty independent bookstore in Cambridge, now joins the ranks of area bookstores opening second locations in Boston. In the spring of 2023, the bookstore will open an outpost in the Prudential Center, taking over what was once a Barnes & Noble. It’ll occupy nearly 30,000 square feet, a massive space, especially compared to the 5500 square foot Cambridge location. “In the simplest terms,” says Chief Creative Officer Alex Meriwether, “we’ll have more space to do things we’re excited about.” That includes an expanded events program, a much bigger children’s book section, and a number of community spaces. The expansion is due in part to the bookstore’s recent partnership with John and Linda Henry, owners of Liverpool FC, the Red Sox, and this newspaper. Meriwether is excited about giving the space its own character. “It’s going to have our philosophy on what kinds of books we display,” he says. The difference is “it’s not going to be an academic bookstore in an academic community,” and he, and the rest of the bookstore team, are looking forward to “learning who this community is and working to make this a special store for them” while retaining “a sense of who Harvard Book Store is as well.”
