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Because they are so terribly ubiquitous, you won't see me posting images of the Gateway Arch up here very often. In this case, I have a really good reason.
On Friday, the Kemper Art Museum unveils "Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future," an unprecedented retrospective of the designer's career. (Here is our preview of the show, from our January issue.) The opening reception is from 7 to 9, and is free; the Kemper is located on Wash. U.'s campus, at the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth. If you can't make it this Friday, the show will run through April 27.
Also wanted to mention that SLU prof and poet Devin Johnston's newest book, Sources (Turtle Point Press, 2008), has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award. (That piece of news I think was broken locally, or announced at the very least, over at Jane Henderson's Post-Dispatch Book Blog.) "Sonically alert," reads the Turtle Point squib, "these poems attend to the world with restless curiosity: 'Pacing rugs/ or battered roads / we wait for what / we know we know.' Charged with expectation, they often take place on thresholds and sills, coming and going between house and street, private involutions and common life, past and present, human and animals, friends and strangers." We would like to gloat a little bit and note that Wash. U.'s Mary Jo Bang won this same award last year; and the year prior, it was Troy Jollimore, whose Tom Thompson in Purgatory was published by St. Louis' Margie/IntuiT Press. One of the local literati once told me that you can't throw a rock in St. Louis without hitting a poet. It pleases me no end that there are not only lots of poets here, but that so many of them are so good. —Stefene Russell
