Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala at Rust Belt Books

You could make the case for Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala as the Nichols and May of contemporary poetry.  Both are clever, sharp-witted writers with a background in performance, each of whom has achieved considerable success in their work as individuals, but (unlike Mike Nichols and Elaine May) continue to appear together as a couple, if not as a comedy act.

Equi and Sala, who are married, will read from their respective work Thursday evening at 7 p.m. at Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street in Buffalo as sponsored by Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Equi, a Chicago area native, is the author of eleven collections of poems, including Federal Woman (1978), Surface Tension (1989), The Cloud of Knowable Things (2003), and, most recently, Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2007), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and short listed for the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize.

"The story of my skin/ is long and involved./ But the story of my hair/ is quite short." begins her "Autobiographical Poem" from The Cloud of Knowable Things.  But what begins with the head in her work inevitably veers toward the heart: "But it is the heart's story/ I want most to share/ with you who also know this pleasure/ of being shut inside/ a vast dark place, alone--/ as if at a small table/ scribbling lies."

Sala, also a Chicago area native who emerged from the LA punk performance scene before relocating to New York City with Equi, is the author of such cult favorites as I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent (1985), The Trip (1987), and Raw Deal: New and Selected Poems, 1980-1994.  His most recent collection of pop culture cannibalizing satirical poems is Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull Press, 2005).

Any reading involving Equi and Sala is likely to produce a few surprises.  "Every good poem is a Trojan Horse," Equi has written.  The Just Buffalo press release for this event describes her reading Thursday as "a multimedia presentation using movie stills from the 1950's and 60's in the form of a tarot deck..."

--R.D. Pohl