Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

Concord Poetry at the Library presents Jeffrey Harrison & Matthew Lippman: 

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Jeffrey Harrison reads from his sixth full-length book of poetry, Between Lakes (Four Way Books, September, 2020), where the death of the speaker’s father places him in the ever-shifting zone between the living and the dead while also sending him back into his journey to manhood. Old arguments are reimagined: What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a participant in one’s life as well as a witness and recorder of the lives of others? The exploration of these questions leads to new discoveries, including the way time reshapes the vision of one’s life and alters relationships, remaking a shared history. Harrison’s other collections include The Singing Underneath (1988), selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, Signs of Arrival (1996), Feeding the Fire (2001), winner of the Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, Incomplete Knowledge (2006), runner-up for the Poets’ Prize, and Into Daylight, published in 2014 by Tupelo Press as the winner of the Dorset Prize and selected by the Massachusetts Center for the Book as a Must-Read Book. View Harrison’s website for interviews in which he talks about the poet’s craft and samples
of his widely-published poetry. He lives in Massachusetts.

Matthew Lippman reads from Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (Four Way Books, 2020), which won the 2018 Levis Prize in Poetry – a collection that “takes on issues of sex, politics, race, religion, and poetry, all subjects our mothers warned us not to bring up at a dinner party. At times dreamily or nightmarishly surreal, at others so realistic we laugh or cringe in recognition. It's outrageously American, crass, funny, fast talking, unbound, and yes, sadly beautiful.” – notes Levis poetry judge Dorianne Laux. Lippman is the author of five additional collections: A LITTLE GUT MAGIC (2018), SALAMI JEW (2014), AMERICAN CHEW (2013), winner of the Burnside Review Book Prize, MONKEY BARS (2010), and THE NEW YEAR OF YELLOW (2007) winner of The Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2008 Patterson Poetry Prize. Lippman is the Editor and Founder of the web-based project Love’s Executive Order (www.lovesexecutiveorder.com) and calls its weekly poems by different poets a chronicle of poetic protest during the current political time. Lippman holds an MFA with a concentration in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Massachusetts.