Christy Davids visited Kelly Writers House on October 24, 2016, to talk with erica lewis, who was passing through Philadelphia to give a reading in Jason Mitchell’s Frank O’Hara’s Last Lover series in between stops in Pittsburgh and Brooklyn.
After reading erica lewis’s latest poetry collection daryl hall is my boyfriend, a collaboration that later became the first book in a box set trilogy, I felt as if I’d returned an epic hero who found a way back home to selfhood/personhood via a sea of layered memories, triggered by songs that change “even in the remembering.”[1] Stirring up an accessible feeling of Odyssean nostos, or the journey home, lewis prefaces her collection with “this is an album about re-ordering the past”; anyone with room for nostalgia is invited to join the poet on memory’s dance floor.
