Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Elizabeth Bradfield in Conversation with Susan Rich | East End Books PTown

April 14 @ 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm EDT

East End Books Boston Seaport Presents: Elizabeth Bradfield “Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry” in Conv. w/ Susan Rich “Blue Atlas” Boston Store 4/14 @5pm

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five books, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, and elsewhere. A Stegner Fellow and Audre Lorde Prize winner, she is the founder of Broadsided Press, teaches at Brandeis University, and has worked as a naturalist in Cascadia and beyond for the past twenty-some years. Bradfield grew up in Tacoma and attended the University of Washington; she lives on Cape Cod.

This field guide is a deeply informative and wildly exuberant visual and literary romp through one of the most spectacular regions of the world–a varied chorus of voices and visual talents, all celebrating the animals and plants of the great Pacific Northwest.–Ray Troll, Artist and Co-author of Cruisin’ the Fossil Coastline

Susan Rich is the author of eight books, including Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems, as well as Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World. Her poetry has earned her awards from Fulbright Foundation, PEN USA, and the Times Literary Supplement (London). Individual poems appear in the Harvard Review, New England Review, O Magazine, and Poetry Ireland, among other places. Susan is co-editor with Kelli Russell Agodon of Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poems. She teaches at Highline College and directs Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women from Seattle. Susan currently resides in Seattle, Washington.

“The remarkable poems of Blue Atlas chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss, but loss is too tame a word, really, for what this speaker bears. ‘I am a woman swollen with the history of my dead, ‘ Rich writes, ‘a body awash in stories.’ She describes an imperiled childhood and a young adulthood that culminates in a coerced midterm abortion, which ‘stays suspended in resin / like a tiny scorpion, / transforming anger into amber.’ Blue Atlas exquisitely performs the way trauma–the utter loss of self-determination, of choice–can turn a life to seawater, to drift, to ‘somehow, the might still be–‘ mapping ‘constellations of in-between, ‘ suspended between deciding and undeciding, from a space outside of the circumference of longing, where poetry lives.”–Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

Venue

East End Books Boston Seaport
300 Pier 4 Boulevard
Boston, MA 02210 United States
+ Google Map
View Venue Website