On Sunday, February 28th at 4:30pm, the Toadstool Bookshop and the Loom Poetry Series will host a live, online reading from three poets, Kevin Prufer, Angela Narciso Torres, and Reginald Gibbons, to celebrate the release of their new books from Four Way Books. This event will be free and open to the public and will offer an opportunity for readers to listen to and discuss new, contemporary poetry.
The Loom Poetry Series is a Harrisville-based initiative to highlight and celebrate the best in contemporary poetry. For more information on the Loom, contact Rebecca Gibson at rebeccagibson55@gmail.com
Kevin Prufer - In The Art of Fiction, his eighth collection of poetry, Prufer’s career-spanning talent for estranging the familiar—and for recording the unthinkable with eerie directness—recurs, enhanced and transformed by the collection’s meta-level attention to the role of fiction in our civic lives. Prufer describes, often through personae, a near future, tracing the political gambit of Fake News and the role of the imagination in our self-understanding, (whether it’s cogent or delusional.) Prufer aims to understand the ugly-casual atmosphere of our often racialized, pervasive distrust.
Angela Narciso Torres - “What Happens Is Neither / the end nor the beginning. / Yet we’re wired to look for signs,” offers the speaker of Angela Narciso Torres’s latest collection What Happens is Neither, which approaches motherhood, aging, and mourning through a series of careful meditations. In poems set in two countries and homes, Torres considers what it means to leave a mark, vanish, and stay in one place. In a profound act of recollection and preservation, Torres shows us how to release part of ourselves but remain whole.
Reginald Gibbons - Reginald Gibbons has eleven poetry collections. His selected poems in translation were published in Spain, Italy, and France. In Renditions, Gibbons conducts an ensemble of voices, using an international selection of writers as departure points for his translation/transformations. Renditions poses the idea that all writing is an act of translation, “translating” observation into word, or moving ideas from one language to another. The poems are imbued with a sense of homage, allowing us to reimagine the borders of language and revel in the fellowship of idea sharing, the “underthoughts that we can (all) sense:” desire, love, pain, and fervor.
Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, the moderator of this event, lives in Marlborough, New Hampshire, and taught poetry at Tufts University. In 2008, she received the Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A previous resident at the MacDowell and The Heinrich Boll Cottage in Ireland, in 2011 she received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach poetry in Hyderabad, India. Her poems have been published in Agni, Antigonish, The Boston Phoenix, Field, The Greensboro Review, The Harvard Review, MARGIE, Mothering, Northwest Review, Pleiades, Salamander, Slate, The Adroit Journal, 236 Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Tupelo's 30/30 project, the Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, reprinted in an anthology called Cadence of Hooves, and featured on Verse Daily. She has previously published two chapbooks--Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition.
To attend this event, click the icon below at 4:30 on Sunday, February 28th.
