2018 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

A reading by four poets who have worked on New England hill farms, West Coast wildfires, and in Rustbelt pool halls and nursing facilities. These are poets who have woven the daily rhythms, connections, and necessities of physical labor into their own poems and poetic practices. Rejecting poetic traditions that romanticize labor in favor of an unflinching poetry that braids hardship with beauty, their muscled and harrowed lyrics bear witness to the poems found in our landscapes and bodies. In a society where poetry is increasingly situated within the confines of academia and work is increasingly mechanized at the expense of compassion, these are the poems we need to survive—poems born of bending and hauling, of felling trees and splitting firewood, of planting seeds and slaughtering animals, of sweeping up broken beer bottles from bar-room floors, and of caring for the creatures and world around us however we must.