Tuesday, June 4th, at 6:30 pm, Q & A and book signing in the Undercroft
The Gerald Cable Quartet: four poets, four friends, four prizes, four debut poetry collections, one reading
When Jessica Greenbaum won the 1998 Gerald Cable Book Award for her debut poetry collection Inventing Difficulty, no one could have predicted that she had blazed a 20th-century trail that would be followed by three friends in the 21st century. Where Is North by Alison Jarvis, Late Life by Stephen Ackerman, and How News Travels by Judy Katz went on to win the 2015, 2020, and 2021 Gerald Cable Book Award. (Jessica blazed new trails in the 21st century with her second and third volumes of poetry, The Two Yvonnes and Spilled and Gone.) Their books contain poems that possess a "sinewy, vividly intelligent humanity"; "that live in the world and the body"; that "illuminate love and desire"; that are "accounts of actual human living...immersions in consciousness." You will find in these poems mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, spouses and friends and lovers, the intimacies and mysteries of love and its tributaries. In formal and free verse, their poems offer a deep engagement with the joys and sorrows of human experience, while never forgetting that all poems are love poems to language.
The Gerald Cable Book Award is sponsored by Silverfish Review Press/Rodger Moody, Publisher.
Contact lthorpe@heavenlyrest.org for more information.