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10 YEARS OF MASS POETRY!

Our 2018 headliners: Sonia Sanchez · Kaveh Akbar · Duy Doan · Jeffrey Harrison · Dorianne Laux · Erika Meitner · Carl Phillips · Nicole Sealey · Sean Thomas Dougherty · Rhina P. Espaillat

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Sunday, May 6 • 1:00pm - 2:00pm
To the Bone: Poems of Work and Manual Labor FILLING

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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.

Moderators
avatar for Julia Bouwsma

Julia Bouwsma

Julia Bouwsma is the author of MIDDEN (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). Her poems and book reviews appear in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Muzzle, Salamander, RHINO, River Styx, and others. She is the recipient of... Read More →

Speakers
avatar for Sean Thomas Dougherty

Sean Thomas Dougherty

Sean Thomas Dougherty has worked in a newspaper plant, as a security guard, a poet in the schools, a preacher to parolees, and as an untenured college lecturer.  He’s also worked in a pool hall, as a caregiver and medical technician for people recovering from traumatic brain injuries... Read More →
avatar for Kevin Goodan

Kevin Goodan

Raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation, Kevin Goodan has worked in a slaughterhouse, fought wildfires, and lived on small sustainable farms.


Sunday May 6, 2018 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
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