Poetry

April is National Poetry Month! Join us in celebrating with an inspiring evening of poetry from local artists.

Featured poets for the reading are:

Diane Elliott
Carolyn Pinet 
Greg Keeler
JoAnne Troxel 
Kari Bowles
Steve Kirchhoff
Diane will also read a poem from June Safford, who is unable to attend the event.

Local resident Ian Powell-Palm has organized an evening of political poetry performance and an Open Mic. The evening, running from 6-9PM, will be divided into two parts: the first hour will feature readings and discussions from local, renowned poets, while the following hours will be dedicated to an audience Open Mic and showcasing of local talent. Participants may read one or two poems, perform a song, or showcase a piece of art.

On a whim, and during a particularly challenging time in his life, fly-fishing guide and author Chris Dombrowski accepted an invitation to the Bahamas—a trip that would alter his life’s trajectory.

Our lives begin like volcanoes, gathering heat under earth's compression. Passion erupts from the magma chamber of our depth. Mid years find us cooling into mature configuration, until at last we reach the golden time of sweet reflection.

Gritty, vivid, at times harsh, Wil Gibson's latest poetry collection, Harvest the Dirt, is a tour-de-force of the American dream-nightmare. Traveling the back roads of double-wide trailers and mobile meth labs, Gibson arrives at a new truth and realism, a pride in the dirt from which you come.

In When We Were Birds, Joe Wilkins wrests his attention away from the griefs, deprivations, and high prairies of his Montana childhood and turns toward “the bean-rusted fields & gutted factories of the Midwest,” toward ordinary injustice and everyday sadness, toward the imminent birth of his son and his own confusions in taking up the mantle of fatherhood, toward faith and grace, legacy and luck.

Jonathan Wells's poems have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, The New Yorker, Poetry International, and other journals. He has also edited an anthology of poems about rock music, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll (MTV Books 2007) and is the author of Train Dance (Four Way Books 2011). Wells has worked as director of Rolling Stone Press and is co-editor of the Tebot Bach New World Translation series with Christopher Merrill.