Poetrio is our monthly poetry event, hosted by Mildred Kiconco Barya. Please welcome our March poets, Chris Abbate, Joan Barasovska, and Anne Harding Woodworth!
This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited number of seats are available to attend the event in-store.
The event is free but registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.
Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.
Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.
This event includes a book signing. If you would like a signed book but can't attend in person, use the order comments field when you order below to request a signed copy and tell us to whom the book should be personalized.
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Chris Abbate’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including Connecticut River Review, Cider Press Review, Comstock Review, and also on Verse Daily. He’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Best of the Net award, and has received awards in the Nazim Hikmet and North Carolina Poetry Society contests. His first book, Talk About God, was published by Main Street Rag in 2017. His full-length collection, Words for Flying, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2022. For more, visit chrisabbate.com
Why do the best of Chris Abbate’s poems make me cry? Could it be envy, because they’re so good they make me wish I’d written them? Could it be the sadness, vulnerability, and love mixed in with the playfulness of these poems? Or maybe their numinousness, which is also always somehow subtly part of the mix? Or is it simply that voice, finally, of “an ache of a boy,” its honesty, its accessibility, its tenderness, speaking a sort of “unspoken language of boys,” especially to those of us who most needed a voice like Abbate’s back in our own boyhoods, and still sorely need it today? It’s all these things. And it’s also because, as with any great music, beautiful singing can have that effect on us. And we wipe our eyes so that we may keep on reading. ~ Paul Hostovsky
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Joan Barasovska lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and serves on the Board of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poems have appeared in Kakalak, San Pedro River Review, Flying South, Crossing the Rift, Speckled Trout Review, Main Street Rag, Redheaded Stepchild, and elsewhere. Joan has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net award. She is the author of Birthing Age (Finishing Line Press, 2018), Carrying Clare (Main Street Rag, 2022), and Orange Tulips (Redhawk Publications, 2022).
The poems in Joan Barasovska’s Orange Tulips are so powerfully teeming with visceral life, the inattentive reader might be forgiven for overlooking their consummate craft. Each poem in this collection is distinguished by the honesty of its details, its fully-rendered tone, and its careful formal design. The book itself is just that: a book, each of whose poems adds to the unfolding arc of narrative, never belabored but always fully present, anchoring and enlarging the individual utterances, until the whole is indeed larger than the sum of its parts. The thrill of reading Orange Tulips is multi-dimensional: Each poem stands on its own, but each participates in the unfolding narrative. Here are rage and grief, loss and pure bewilderment, enacted through a lens of honesty and love. Orange Tulips is a significant achievement.
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Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of eight books of poetry and four chapbooks. Her most recent book is GENDER: Two Novellas in Verse. An excerpt from her chapbook, The Last Gun, received the COG Poetry Award. Her seventh book, Trouble, received the 2022 William Meredith Poetry Award. Woodworth is a member of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, MA, and of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., where she and her husband live when they are not at their cabin in the mountains of Western North Carolina. For more, visit http://www.annehardingwoodworth.com
Anne Harding Woodworth has brought together two novellas in verse that share a look at the role of male and female. In Martin/Martina, a young woman dresses as a man, is accused of fathering a child, and as the boy’s father, raises him. In Aftermath, a member of an asexual group—among three survivor groups that have formed after cataclysm has destroyed most of civilization—becomes pregnant. Two not dissimilar landscapes set the stage for these stories, somewhere in (perhaps) a Mediterranean place of the eleventh century, as well as one of today and of the future. Regardless of time frame, the atmosphere in both novellas lures us into lives of sex, parenting, labor, confusion, and friendship, all in a mixture of free verse, form, and rhyme.
