Concord Poetry at the Library Series presents

Amy Clark & Jonathan Weinert

Sunday, March 2 from 3:00-4:15 PM

The Goodwin Forum, Main Branch

With book signings and light refreshments

PLEASE REGISTER BELOW FOR A SEAT IN THE FORUM

Join us for an afternoon with two nationally celebrated poets, Amy Clark and Jonathan Weinert, who will read and engage in a Q & A about their most recent beautifully moving collections that appeared during the pandemic.

Among critical reviews for Amy Clark’s Roundabout

The poems in Amy Clark’s Roundabout are plainspoken, intimate, and elegant—but they are also beautifully crafted and psychologically complex, meditating on the vagaries of motherhood, the difficulties of family, and the sudden imposition of violence. This is a wonderful collection, one I’ll return to with pleasure. —Kevin Prufer

The poems in Amy M. Clark's splendid second collection, Roundabout, plunge us into a cherished, safe microcosm of two (a mother and a son) that is perpetually threatened, if not by school violence, then by the violence of seemingly safe streets populated by children in parkas and runners in crosswalks. The terrifying ambivalence of American life, with its combination of privilege and love underpinned by specters of fear and abuse, manifests in every page of Roundabout--all balanced by Clark's near-miraculous craft. No surprise this poet is also a dancer--the triolets that structure each section almost dance off the page. It's hope for new relationships and a boy's learning that lift up Clark's voice and make Roundabout a prism for a modern woman's modern life. — Molly Peacock

Among critical reviews for Jonathan Weinet’s A Slow Green Sleep

A Slow Green Sleep is an astonishing and visionary book of poetic eco-witnessing that combines W. S. Merwin’s stoic political engagement with Wallace Stevens’ self-awareness of the mind at work. But even as the poems consider the terror of apocalypse, Weinert’s touch is so gentle—so anti-ego—that the effect is one of poignant acquiescence as Weinert repeatedly places the invisible dot of the self inside the vast trajectory of ecological time...there’s a certain comfort in the fact that “estrangement is only human,” and there persists the hope that “[w]e are going to live on / despite / incursions in the genome.” This book is profoundly of our moment—not to mention wise and deft and moving. — Wayne Miller, author of Post- and The City, Our City

I wept reading the poems in A Slow Green Sleep, where cities and neighborhoods have already fallen, and where, after we “sent our certainty over all the earth,” all that remains for the future is our “cellphone chipsets, / diapers, filings, clickers, toilet seats, / the petrified remains of hot-drink cups.” What is truly extraordinary and puzzling with each read of this important collection is how exactly Jonathan Weinert manages to write poems that sing right into the heartbreaking crisis of our earth’s destruction and are at the same time so unbelievably beautiful. I believe the answer is abiding love, love which permeates every word, every line, every page. A Slow Green Sleep is a tremendous achievement.

— Victoria Redel, author of Before Everything and Woman Without Umbrella

About Amy Clark and Jonathan Weinert

AMY M. CLARK grew up in San Luis Obispo, California. She is a graduate of Carleton College, and holds degrees from the University of Nevada, Reno, and Spalding University’s MFA Program. Amy’s second collection of poems, Roundabout, was published by Press 53 in 2020. Her first book, Stray Home (University of North Texas Press, 2010), won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry 2009 and was a Must-Read selection by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She is co-author with Molly Peacock of the chapbook, A Turn Around the Mansion Grounds: Poems in Conversation & a Conversation (Slapering Hol Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared on the Writer’s Almanac, in the anthology Good Poems, American Places (Viking 2011), and in various journals. Amy is an active volunteer with the gun violence prevention group Grassroots4GVP. She lives in Stow, Massachusetts. For more information, visit amymclark.com. (Photo by Mira Whiting)

Jonathan Weinert is the author of A Slow Green Sleep (2021), winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, In the Mode of Disappearance (2008), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and Thirteen Small Apostrophes (2012), a chapbook. He is co-editor of Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W.S. Merwin (2012), a collection of essays. Jonathan has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Ucross Foundation, and Caldera Arts. Recent poems and prose appear in Harvard Review, Blackbird, Good River Review, and On the Seawall. A graduate of Brandeis University and the Spalding University MFA in Writing Program, Jonathan lives and works in Stow, Massachusetts. Visit jonathanweinert.com for more information.

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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