Spokane a frequent backdrop in former Poet Laureate Laura Read’s latest collection, ‘The Serious World’

In “The Serious World,” the latest collection from former Spokane Poet Laureate Laura Read, the poem “Dear Sylvia,” addressed Sylvia Plath, writing:

“When I was 32, I was driving home from work / on Sunset Boulevard, which sounds more picturesque / than it is: there’s an old coffee shop that is sometimes / an ice cream shop and is now boarded up, / and a bar called Lucky You. / Railroad tracks that look like relics except / that a train is always coming, persistent / as history, so the rattling is part of the background / of every thought I’ve ever had / in my little car on the way to and from / my job, which was sometimes all the time / and space in a day when I could hear my own thoughts, / as my mother used to say when I asked her why / she stayed up so late and was always tired.”

Read will be in conversation with former Washington Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken on Nov. 1 at the Central Library to launch “The Serious World,” which tackles family, childhood, depression, mental illness and more, with humor and pathos. Like “Dear Sylvia,” many of the poems are in conversation with literary figures such as Plath, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir.

“The book kind of started with Sylvia during the pandemic,” Read said. “I and most people that I knew were struggling with mental health, and I kept thinking about what would Sylvia have thought, had she been alive now? And so I just started writing little letters to her, and I thought there were things she might want to know, and that was kind of interesting to me.”

Read provided Plath with all kinds of updates: EMDR therapy, Kurt Cobain, squirrel calendars and so much more. Read also took classes at the Brooklyn Institute on Duras and de Beauvoir. These historical women had long informed Read’s life because her mom was a women’s studies professor for years and a strong role model for Read.

“I found them all so interesting,” Read said. “And then my friend, Kate Lebo, I was talking to her on a walk about I was like, ‘Can I put them all together?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah.’ And she goes, ‘You know why you need Marguerite? And I was like, ‘Why?’ And I think I put this in the poem. I think I rewrote it to put her comment in it. She said, ‘Sylvia never grew old,’ and she said, ‘You need someone to grow old with.’ ”

In “Winged Victory,” the final poem of the collection, Read wrote, “Time is my medium and my subject.” When asked about that line, as well as the way childhood and aging play out in the collection, Read explained by talking about something Flenniken said during a Zoom talk.

“She said that the older she gets, the more experiences she has, she thinks that they’re kind of like a scrim through which she’s able to see the present moment, but she can’t see the present moment without all of the past also being there,” Read said.

Many of Read’s poems contain characters who are friends and family members, and Spokane is a frequent backdrop and subject. But Read’s family had even more influence on “The Serious World” than their appearances in her poems. Her son Ben came up with the cover.

“I called Ben, and he was like, ‘Well, Mom, the cover is obviously looking at a train window at a rabbit,’ Read said. “And I was like, ‘What? How is that obvious to you?’ But I know there is a reference in a poem to seeing rabbits at the airport. Like, I understand like that. It’s a bit of an allusion.

“But he was like, ‘It’s so whimsical and funny, and next to the title, it’ll create that mix of tones.’”