Celebrate National Poetry Month with Vermont poets Dede Cummings, Megan Buchanan, and James Crews.
ABOUT TO LOOK OUT FROM AND DEDE CUMMINGS:
"In To Look Out From, Dede Cummings takes good advantage of the imaginative fluidity that poetry offers. Even her poems of memory and family are driven by curiosity and enlivened by quick maneuvers and spritely turns. And she is careful never to leave the reader behind." - Billy Collins
"Dede Cummings' poems in To Look Out From are breathtakingly vivid. Deeply felt, they often chronicle the relationship between self and the natural world, between self and others. These are New England poems that transcend New England. They are well-crafted testaments, often pastoral, to the cycles of life. At times they are elegiac and bittersweet, yet attentive in their hopefulness and trust in the Great Wonderments and mysteries. At times gracefully discursive and always brilliantly paced, they are poems given to recovery and renewal. This is a book I will read over and over." - Clarence Major
Dede Cummings is a writer, literary agent/publisher and commentator for Vermont Public Radio. At Middlebury College, she was the recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award, attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as an undergraduate fellow, and studied with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. In 2013, she was a poetry contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has been published in Mademoiselle, The Lake, InQuire, Vending Machine Press, Kentucky Review, Connotation Press, Mom Egg Review, and Bloodroot Literary Magazine. She was a Discover/The Nation poetry semi-finalist and was awarded a writer’s grant and a partial fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center in 2016. Her first poetry collection, To Look Out From, was awarded the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and is due out in April 2017. Dede lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she designs books and runs the startup Green Writers Press.
ABOUT THE BOOK OF WHAT STAYS AND JAMES CREWS:
For any of us, what stays? For the arsonist's wife who has not yet left? The devout saint trudging another mile in his nail-shoes? The lost couple in their dying moments in a Nebraska blizzard? The old woman who refuses to leave her home in Chernobyl? With an unflinching eye, James Crews gives us the forbidden love, forbidden unions, and secret lives that, whatever the loss, the attrition, the cost, we must acknowledge, must hold, must keep. And here, in Crews' finely wrought, deeply felt poems, is their testimony.
"This is a marvelous book: a debut collection filled with the voice of an old soul, someone who has battled to claim what he knows. James Crews compassionate intelligence ranges wide, looking for stories within the stories of news accounts, saints, and mythological figures, sifting through experience and possibility to find moments of intense clarity and feeling." - Teresa Scollon, ForeWord
James Crews' work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poet Lore, and The New Republic, among other journals, and he is a regular contributor to The (London) Times Literary Supplement. His first collection of poetry, The Book of What Stays, won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and received a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award. His second collection, Telling My Father, won the Cowles Prize and will be published by Southeast Missouri State University Press. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in Writing and Literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he was an Othmer Fellow and worked for Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry newspaper column. He lives on an organic farm with his partner in Shaftsbury, Vermont and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University.
ABOUT CLOTHESLINE RELIGION AND MEGAN BUCHANAN:
Clothesline Religion chronicles twenty years worth of adventures in the life of an artist as young single mother. Megan Buchanan, a poet and professional dancer, gave birth to a daughter at 22, lived abroad in Ireland and France, and came back home again to Southern California and the mountains of the Southwest. This debut poetry collection spans wild open roads, backyard vegetable gardens, Irish pubs, country dance halls, Vermont screen-porches, midnight river valleys, artist studios, and the world of waking dreams. Buchanan's poems offer fierce evidence of what she calls "ordinary magic" --and what others might call mindfulness--discovering gratitude, the path of recovery, and a mother's deep joy.
“How fierce and resilient, what a tremendous and tender heart. Clothesline Religion is gorgeous, powerful. I was utterly enrapt, reading it out in the yard under the full sun. And transformed—the book inspired me to take my own daughter out of school for a road trip, time for just her and I. Mother and daughter.” —Robin MacArthur, author of Half Wild
Megan Buchanan’s poems have appeared in such journals as The Sun Magazine, make/shift, A Woman’s Thing, and multiple anthologies. Born in California, she’s lived for long stretches in Ireland, the mountains of the southwest, and New England. Her work has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Vermont Arts Council, and the Vermont Studio Center. Megan is also a collaborative performer and dancemaker, a teacher, and an activist. She currently lives in southern Vermont with her two children. Green Writers Press has just published Megan Buchanan’s first full-length poetry collection, Clothesline Religion.
DATE: Thursday, April 20th at 6:30pm
LOCATION: Phoenix Books Rutland
ADMISSION: Free and open to all.