Nicole Cooley and Julia Kasdorf

            During the poetry reading, Nicole Cooley and Julia Kasdorf would alternate reading different poems from the book they chose to share. Cooley explained how she would give her first drafts of poetry to Kasdorf to edit. She described how awful her originals were and how Kasdorf is credited for making them good enough to publish. They seem to have a very close relationship and said that they became partners before either of them had books. A large amount of the poems that Cooley read were about hurricane Katrina and how it affected New Orleans. She also read a poem about how the levees in New Orleans were used to save the white neighborhoods by having the water flow into the black neighborhoods. This was new information to her and was moved by not knowing about this earlier while she was living in Louisiana. She was also affected by hurricane Katrina because her parents lived in New Orleans during the time and she did not hear from them for days so this affected her emotionally. The details in this poem were very vivid in regards to the emotions she was feeling during the time, what her siblings told her, when she finally got in contact with her parents, and also the damage caused by the hurricane. My favorite poem that she read was about these notes posted on the building of this one local restaurant. Based off of the note, as the listener, I was able to tell that this restaurant meant a lot to the people located in the community. Cooley said that there were hundreds of notes and she spent an hour in front of the restaurant writing them down. The poems Kasdorf read I found hard to follow. There was one about a kickboxing class and another I think that was about her childhood, but I was not exactly sure. With the poems that she read, I felt that it would be more effective if I read them myself so that I can analyze them and have a better understanding. Other than some slight confusion during the reading, I enjoyed listening to their poetry.