For some of us, it’s feeling mighty hot in Asheville of late; but I understand it’s generally hotter (and either much drier or substantially wetter) in most parts of the country than it is here. Whatever the weather outside, you’ll find cool, dry air to breathe, and delicious coffee and tea and cold specialty beverages on offer, in the Malaprop’s Bookstore Café, seven days a week! On the first Sunday of each month at 3:00 p.m., we also offer you Poetrio: readings from their recent books by three different poets. This coming Sunday, August 7, we’ll hear readings (with booksignings afterwards) from Nancy K Pearson with The Whole By Contemplation of a Single Bone, Ronald Moran presenting Eye of the World, andHilde Weisert with The Scheme of Things.
Please join us to welcome these three poets; and remember, there is free parking available most days of the week in the downtown city garages, where the first hour of parking is free. (The closest garages to Malaprop’s are the Rankin Street and Cellular Center garages.) We offer a parking voucher for an additional hour of free parking for shoppers who make a purchase at Malaprop’s. It adds up to plenty of free parking time to listen to poetry!
Nancy K. Pearson is originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee, recently taught poetry at the University of Houston, and now lives in Maryland. Her poems have been published in such journals as The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She has earned a number of awards, including two seven-month poetry fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her first book of poems, Two Minutes of Light, earned her the L.L. Winship / PEN New England award, and the book was named a ‘Must Read Book’ at the 2009 Annual Massachusetts Book Awards. Her second book, The Whole by Contemplation of a Single Bone, was published in April of this year and brought her the 2016 Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press. The publisher’s review of the book emphasizes that “her poems meditate on the lyric of absence and fragmentation. Pearson’s poems are restless, unsettling, and revelatory.” In a recent interview with Joey Di Guglielmo published on the website of the Washington Blade, Nancy K. Pearson confirmed that “Poetry works best for me because I think in fragments and metaphors. I’m always making connections between disparate images or ideas. . . . My mind likes to leap and I’m obsessed with words, sound and texture.”
Ronald Moran taught at UNC-Chapel Hill and then at Clemson University, where he served in a number of faculty and administrative positions. He is the author of a book of literary criticism and is co-author of an additional critical work, and his poems and essays are widely published in magazines and journals. His thirteen collections of poetry include Saying These Things, the inaugural volume of poetry issued by the Clemson University Digital Press in 2004. He has been recognized with numerous awards for his poetry, and his work is archived in the James B. Duke Library at Furman University. Susan Meyers notes qualities of Ronald Moran’s poetic voice that I always appreciate as well: “Poem after poem shows an intelligent mind at work, one that is also good-natured, quirky and self-deprecatory.” Of Ronald Moran’s most recent book, Eye of the World, poet David Kirby writes, “The great poems are poems of retrieval or thanks or both, and Ronald Moran’s plain-spoken, affecting lyrics are squarely in this last category. He searches for and finds the people, now gone, who made his life what it is: his parents, the girls he dated, his beloved wife Jane. In doing so, this grateful, gifted poet teaches us how to burrow into and recognize the riches in our own lives.”
Poet and editor Hilde Weisert worked for many years with the Geraldine Dodge Foundation as a Dodge Poet in the Schools, read at several Dodge Festivals, and edited a book about teaching poetry in the schools that was published by the Dodge Poetry Project. She is a co-founder of the Society for Veterinary Medicine and Literature, which co-sponsored the first international conference on Veterinary Medicine and Literature in 2010 in Guelph, Ontario. In addition, she co-edited the 2012 anthology Animal Companions, Animal Doctors, Animal People: Poems, Essays, and Stories on Our Essential Connections, published by Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph. Her poems have been published in a variety of literary reviews and journals, and she has earned writing fellowships as well as awards and recognitions for her poetry. Poet Laura Boss has this praise for Hilde Weisert’s recent book: “Hilde Weisert’s The Scheme of Things is a compelling and haunting book. . . Weisert’s powerful voice is at times wise, wry, worldly, but always compassionate as she takes the reader on an odyssey that includes this country, Paris, and even Hungary, but also the past. Weisert is the consummate poet when it comes to language. I can’t think of another poet whose language is so exquisite, original, and luminous.”
Come for cool air, luminous and revelatory language, and the music of poetry in the Malaprop’s Bookstore Café this coming Sunday, August 7, 3:00 p.m.
Remember, too, our monthly Poetry on Request event (information just below)!
Virginia
Poetrio: Nancy K. Pearson, Ronald Moran, Hilde Weisert
Sunday, August 7, 3:00 p.m.
Malaprop’s Bookstore Cafe
55 Haywood Street
Asheville, N.C. 28801