Erica Lewis’ poems look like skyscrapers — each line just a couple-few words spilling down the page in a narrow band. From those rapid-fire line breaks, she delivers little jolts of revelation: “set the world on / fire from the radiance / of an orange tree,” goes one bit in her latest collection, “mahogany,” which is free of capital letters. “we recite ourselves to life,” goes another.
The San Francisco writer penned the book while caring for her mother during a five-year sickness. Each poem’s title comes from a lyric in a Diana Ross song that was part of the ongoing soundtrack in Lewis’ childhood home in Cincinnati.
On Thursday, Oct. 26, Lewis reads from “mahogany” at Green Apple Books on the Park. Listeners can expect shards of wisdom about grief and what comes after: “i am enjoying / how the wreckage / can take you home” or “a lot of what weighs / us down isn’t ours / to carry.”