The Friends of the Library Poetry Series presents Julia Thacker and Hannah Larrabee, with Q & A, book-signings, refreshments.

Julia Thacker reads from her debut collection, To Wildness (Waywiser Press, 2025) winner of the 19th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize chosen by the internationally acclaimed poet, Paul Muldoon. The book was also a finalist in the National Poetry Series.

In recipes, spells, odes and elegies, To Wildness conjures what has been lost and what remains, These are poems of the body. They rub up against one another and knock elbows. In this collection, the dead reside alongside the living. Ancestors roost in trees, having forgotten language, their coats inside out. Others sulk in the eaves, their ears clogged with clover. The past made vivid renders an extravagant present and offers a balm to the isolation of the contemporary world.

As Joan Houlihan says in her enthusiastic endorsement, “Teeming with image, sensation and sound, the poems in To Wildness tumble us into a glorious exuberance of catalog and character, rural landscape and dark imaginings. (‘We ate ants peeled from the bark, a rain of plums / when he rattled the trees. Lumbering, Shackled.”) Ancestral voices speak from the grave; fabulist figures like the girl buried with a finch tell their stories; and contemporary ghosts only the narrator sees abound (Let me touch them as they pass.)”

The granddaughter of a Harlan County coal miner, Julia Thacker was raised in Dayton Ohio. She first came to Massachusetts as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has also been the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the Corporation of Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems appear in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, The New Republic and Pleiades. A portfolio of her work is included in the 25th anniversary issue of Poetry International. Julia has taught writing at Tufts University, Radcliffe Seminars and as poet-in-residence in public schools throughout the state. In 2024, she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount. She lives outside of Boston. www.juliathacker.com

Hannah Larrabee’s Wonder Tissue won the Airlie Press Poetry Prize. Her new chapbook, The Observable Universe, is out from Lily Press and was longlisted for a Massachusetts Book Award. Hannah’s had work in Wild Roof, Flypaper Lit, River Heron Review, Gertrude Press, Maine Review, Molecule, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. She wrote poetry for the NASA James Webb Space Telescope program, and she participated in an Arctic Circle Residency with artists and scientists in October 2022. Hannah received an MFA from the University of New Hampshire where she studied with Charles Simic. She’s currently an editor at Nixes Mate Review.

The Observable Universe arrives like a meteor singing the poetic landscape. In this exquisite collection, Hannah Larrabee transforms the everyday into explorations of earthly things. How memory opens the cracks in everything, of which the poet seeks to repair. From volcanos to Smokey Bear’s dating profile, to the songs of full-throated frogs and the brightness of the night sky, these poems show how the “delicate assembly of love” reveals and shapes our 21st century lives. Nothing is quite as it seems. Lustrous in its language, Larrabee illuminates the nature of human expression with every word. As she writes, “The clouds are so low here; I want to know /when they will touch me.” —January Gill O’Neil, Author of Glitter Road

This program is made possible by the generous support of the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, a patron-supported non-profit organization.
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