Join acclaimed poets Maya Janson and former Concord resident Helena Minton who will read and engage in a Q & A about their craft. This event will take place in-person in the Goodwin Forum at the Main Library. 

PLEASE REGISTER BELOW FOR A SEAT IN THE GOODWIN FORUM

Maya Janson reads from On the Mercy Me Planet (Blue Edge Books, 2022). In these elegant, sparkling poems, Janson writes about life's contradictory, mercurial nature with wit and warmth. Her imagination is expansive, her images surprising and delightful. "Beware the urge to haul everything you own/ to the top of a mountain in order to hurl it," she writes in 'Pushing the Dead Chevy.' The poems, personal and intimate, ponder the duality in daily life, that it is both traumatic and triumphant, that we understand and yet know nothing. "In mythology the pomegranate/is said to signify the underworld. In real life,/ a simple granite headstone will do." Despite death, loss, injury and breakups, diagnoses and climate change, in Janson's poems the sea still laps against the shore, the rower still goes in, out, and back in again. "Find the way then lose the way. Repeat."

Helena Minton reads from Paris Paint Box, New and Selected Poems (Loom Press, 2022) which opens with a sequence about the life and work of the French Impressionist painter, Berthe Morisot and the links between mothers and daughters, her own and Morisot's. Other new poems focus on everyday moments, and meditations on the past. Selections from her previous work touch on family, gardens, New England history and landscapes, and the Alaska wilderness. “These beautiful poems are both sensual and spare, performing one of poetry’s most urgent tasks, to show us what is before our eyes and what to our peril we so easily miss—” Betsy Sholl, author of House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems “Minton draws our attention, through metaphors of art and nature, to a series of likenesses that otherwise can’t be named.” —Joyce Peseroff, author of Petition

Maya Janson’s first book, Murmur & Crush, was published by Hedgerow Books. Janson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Rattle, Lyric, Guernica, Alaska Quarterly Review, Jubilat, and other journals, as well as Best American Poetry. A graduate of Smith College and Ada Comstock Scholar ’87, she also holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and has received fellowships from MacDowell and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she has worked as a lecturer in creative writing at Smith College and as a community mental health nurse.

Helena Minton’s previous collections include The Canal Bed, The Gardener and the Bees, and The Raincoat Colors. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Sou’wester, Ibbetson Street, The Listening Eye, West Branch, Nasty Women Poets, An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse and, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace. She worked for many years as the director of a public library, and has also taught English Composition and Creative Writing. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and serves on the Board of the Robert Frost Foundation, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She lives north of Boston.

Sponsored by The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library in Concord, Massachusetts.