Margo Berdeshevsky will be reading from her new book of short stories Beautiful Soon Enough.

In 23 brief, dreamy stories set in locales from Paris to Cuba, poet, actress and photographer Berdeshevsky remains transfixed by beauty and desire. Window, the first piece, sets the tone: a woman stands at the window wearing a garter belt and motions to her lover standing outside in the snow. Elsewhere, seductions occur in places like church, where a narrator waits to meet her neighbor; on the streets of San Francisco; within a community of Russian émigrés in Paris; or by the waiter in a Parisian cafe bathroom—scenes all depicted with a certain aloof obliqueness. Evocations rather than development are Berdeshevsky's forte, as in Cage, where a caged white female monkey in a Manhattan pet store becomes a metaphor for the protagonist, who is sexually assaulted in the store. In many of the pieces, accompanied by photographs of statues and nudes by the author, the protagonists wait for a beautiful thing to happen.
Margo has also published a collection of poetry, But A Passage In Wilderness, and has received the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America (selected by Marie Ponsot,) 5 Pushcart Prize nominations and the Chelsea Poetry Award among others. Her work is published in journals including The Southern Review, The Poetry Review (UK) and Van Gogh's Ear. A visual artist as well, she has exhibited in France, Hawaii, and New York. A ‘visual poem’ series, Les Ombres de Versailles, was seen at the Parisian Galerie Benchaieb. Find out more at http://margoberdeshevsky.blogspot.com/