Peterborough - Poets Rebecca Kaiser Gibson and Richard Smith !

Saturday, June 11, 2022 - 11:00am

 Rebecca Gibson and Richard Smith introducing and reading from their recent collections of poetry. Rebecca’s latest is Girl As Birch which moves from serial impressionistic poems of early childhood to discrete lyric poems of memory and experience and on to a sense of emotional, social, spiritual evolution, not resolution.  Richard Smith’s Not A Soul But Us: A Story In 84 Sonnets was last year’s May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, selected by New Ipswich poet, Meg Kearney. The poems are set in mid-14th century Yorkshire where the plague pandemic has wiped out half the inhabitants of a remote village leaving behind a 12 year old shepherd boy. He tells his story of near starvation, brutal winters, and the help of his dog as he keeps his flock alive and over the years reconnects with the life around him. 

Rebecca is the judge of this year’s May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. 

"Like the intimacy found inside a walled garden, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson’s exquisite poems in Girl as Birch meditate on the domain of girlhood, coming of age, and the joys and dangers of life lived as a woman. Her luxurious play with language renders each poem simultaneously fierce and delicate. Her words and voice, “sharp as green apples,” magnified by a relationship to mythology and ekphrasis, remind us of the delight of knowing and rediscovering the self and of our own relationship with the natural world that reveals the private interior spaces we inhabit.”

—Didi Jackson, author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press)

Of Richard Smith's collection poet Meg Kearney writes "Timely, remarkable, and unforgettable, these eighty-four sonnets are so well crafted that we cease to notice the form, swept away as we are by the current of the story and its song."

This verse novel drives to the heart of what we humans are capable of when boiled down to our very core in the struggle to survive.

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson is the author of Opinel (Bauhan Publishing, 2015) and two chapbooks, Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition. A recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, The Heinrich Böll Cottage in Ireland, and the 2008 Fellowship in Poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to teach poetry in Hyderabad, India, in 2011. She is founder and director of The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville, a poetry reading series. Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal; Agni; Field; The Greensboro Review; Green Mountain Review; The Harvard Review; Ocean State Review; Poems2Go; Salamander; Slate; The Poetry Porch; The Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art; The Tupelo Quarterly, been featured on Verse Daily, and included in two anthologies, Cadence of Hooves, and The Best of Tupelo Press 30/30 Project's First Year. Gibson previously taught poetry at Tufts University for 23 years. She lives in Marlborough, New Hampshire.
 

Richard Smith began life as an English major. After graduating from Princeton, he worked in publishing for twelve years, including stints as managing editor of The Hudson Review and World Policy Journal. In his thirties, he retooled as a clinical psychologist, earning his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, and now maintains a private practice in Washington, D.C. He is on the core faculty of the Center for Existential Studies and Psychotherapy, for which he gives presentations on plays and novels, ranging from Sophocles to Toni Morrison, exploring how an existential sensibility can lend these voices fresh urgency. He and his partner live with their two dogs, who inspired the sonnet-writing that led to this book.

 

Event address: 
12 Depot Sq
Peterborough, NH 03458
Books: 
Not a Soul But Us: A Story in 84 Sonnets By Richard Smith Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9780872333604
Availability: In Stock, Click Title for Location
Published: Bauhan Pub - March 18th, 2022

Girl as Birch: Poems By Rebecca Kaiser Gibson Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9780872333338
Availability: In Stock, Click Title for Location
Published: Bauhan Pub - March 18th, 2022

Opinel: Poems By Rebecca Gibson Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9780872332027
Availability: In Stock, Click Title for Location
Published: Bauhan Pub - October 6th, 2015