Poetry Reading: Melanie Green, Margaret Chula, Carolyn Martin

Annie Bloom's welcomes these three wonderful local poets.

The poems in Melanie Green's A Long, Wide Stretch of Calm (Poetry Box) are an invitation to slow down, to rest deep into quiet and the contemplative. Melanie Green’s poetry explores the connection with the numinous—as well as speaking to the difficulty of living with a chronic illness.

In Shadow Man (Poetry Box), Margaret Chula brings her father out of the shadows where he had been since 1957, the day her mother packed their five children—all under the age of ten—into the car and drove away. Over the years, Margaret comes to accept the differences between a mother who wants China cups with saucers and a father who’s content with a Budweiser. Through writing about these awkward, often heartbreaking, interactions with her estranged father, she discovers that there’s more than one truth and that each of us must find our own.

From the universal to the personal, the formal to the experimental, Carolyn Martin's fourth poetry collection, A Penchant for Masquerades (Unsolicited Press), takes an unflinching look at the fluidity of truth, time, identity, history, death, and relationships. A lover of all things poetic, Martin has created an eclectic collection for readers who have a penchant for words and who are open to believing in everything and nothing.