Mark Yakich, expert wordsman and friend of the shop, will be bending neurons and making new magnetic fields inside the walls of Ada Books Friday, February 22nd, 7pm.

Here's something from his first book of poems, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross:

Prose Sonnet

He will engineer the sunrise, take apart the clouds as if unbuttoning his shirt. On the way to your house, he will bend down, tie his shoes like framing a picture. He will clip flowers, with his teeth, from the neighbor's garden. He will discard them before reaching your house. He will descend the hill pretending not to be watched as you watch him from the smallest attic window.

But you will not see him round the final curve. Before letting him in, you will forget to ask him to replace the pebbles he's kept in his hip pocket with the heavy rock near the mailbox. Because you are already in love, "Sit down," you will say, pointing to the chair, "no, don't kiss me, it won't be necessary."

And it's echo in his second, The Making of Collateral Beauty:

Prose Sonnet

The shirt in the poem was real, the house was not, and the last line was stolen from a philosopher who was in love with a 13-year-old boy. The attic window from which the reader views this alleged failing in love was pentagonal, red and yellow stained glass. Over the years, many neighborhood kids have tried to knock out the window with rocks and baseballs, but it can only be smashed from the inside out.

He will read from these, if it pleases him, and from his latest collection, The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine. It's picture lords over this text.

You can read other poems and eye his illustrations at www.markyakich.com.