Steven Cramer reads from his sixth collection, Listen (MadHat Press, 2020),  lucid, smart portrayals of  the “darker corners” of despair through scores of illuminating juxtapositions.  Experimenting with many verse forms to give shape to the mind’s restless shifts and associations—sometimes absurdly funny, bracingly honest, and always sharp in thought and craft—the lyric testimony of Listen reaffirms the indispensable, if fragile, consolations of art.  Cramer’s previous books of poetry are The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (1987), The World Book (1992), Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997), Goodbye to the Orchard ( 2004)—winner of the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club and named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book—and Clangings (2012). His poems and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals, including  The Atlantic Monthly, Field, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, as well as in several poetry anthologies. He has taught at Bennington College, Boston University, M.I.T., and Tufts University; and he founded and now teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University.

Joyce Peseroff  reads from her sixth collection, Petition (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020). From privilege at a gas station to fraud in a memorial grove, Peseroff follows the faults of indifference and division that crack our impulses toward mercy and love. She nests fragmented tales of the overheard and overlooked—lonely widowers, a lost hiker, predatory trees, an angry jury—in poems that bring a formal restlessness to common speech. With wit and compassion, Petition renders the tense joys and vivid griefs of mortal and moral experience in the luminous moment when the ordinary becomes singular. Peseroff edited Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake, The Ploughshares Poetry Reader, and Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon. Her fifth book of poems, Know Thyself, was designated a “must read” by the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award. Recent poems and reviews appear in American Journal of Poetry, Consequence, On the Seawall, Massachusetts Review, Plume, Salamander, and on the website The Woven Tale Press. She directed and taught in UMass Boston’s MFA Program in its first four years. Currently she blogs on writing and literature at her website and writes a poetry column for Arrowsmith Press.

Sponsored by The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library