 My name is Samantha, I'm the events coordinator here at Bear Pond Books. Thank you for coming to our poetry reading with two Vermont poets, Alison Freyne and Bianca Stone. I know we're all sick of the weather lately, but it's probably fitting to have water falling from the sky for this reading because the poems I found in Alison and Bianca's newest books are soaked in grief and the thin veil between the living and the departed. And rather than feel depressed, I think these words and playful images give you a sense of reverie and wonder. I love the playfulness in Bianca's Mobius Strip Club of Grief, and the honesty of Alison's retrospect in steel. If you don't already have a copy, I urge you to pick one up. We have them here on the table with the roses and the registers are open all night and the poets will be signing their books after the reading. Each poet will read and talk for about 15 to 20 minutes each, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. I'd like to remind everyone at this time to please mute or turn off your cell phones and to let you know that the front door is locked. So if you need to leave during the event, please use the back door, which is to my right. The front door will reopen after the reading. The bathroom is also located at the back of the store to the right of the back door, and please help yourself to refreshments on the side table. I'd like to thank the Vermont Arts Council for featuring this event as a Vermont Arts 2018 program. And I'd also like to thank Orca Media and WGDR, Goddard College Community Radio. They are filming and recording tonight's event. I'd like to pass around our newsletter because if you'd like to hear these recordings and to watch the video, our newsletter is a good place to find us. And I'd like to let you know that we're hosting author Eleanor Georgieu with her debut collection of short stories, The Immigrant's Refrigerator. She'll be doing a reading and a talk with Laurie Stravrand of the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. That's next week, the 24th at 7 p.m. They will be discussing immigration and how it affects one story of oneself. That's going to be an interesting event, so coming out for that. And thanks for coming in this weather tonight. This is really fabulous to have such a nice crowd of poets and poetry fans. I'll introduce our authors. Bianca Stone is a writer and visual artist, born and raised in Vermont. In 2007, she moved to New York City, where she received her MFA from NYU. She collaborated with Ann Carson on Antigonek. Is that the correct? That's right. That's just right, yeah. Well, because it's about Antigone. It's a pairing of Carson's translation of Antigone and Stone's illustration and comics. And that was published in 2012. Stone is the author of the poetry collections, Someone Else's Wedding Vows, Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours, and most recently, The Mobius Strip Club of Breaks, which we have here. Her poems, poetry, comics, and non-fiction have appeared in a variety of magazines, including Poetry, Jubalot, and Tin House Magazine. She has returned to live in Vermont with her husband and collaborator, the poet Ben Peace, and their daughter Odette, where they run the Ruth Stone Foundation and Letterpress Studio. Alison Prine's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Plowshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Her debut collection of poems, Steel, was chosen by Jeffrey Harrison for the Cider Press Review Book Award, and was published in January of 2016. Steel was then named a finalist for the 2017 Vermont Book Award, and Alison lives in Burlington, where she works as a psychotherapist. Please help me welcome Alison Prine. Thank you so much. Can everyone hear okay? I can't tell if this is really doing anything. Yeah, it is. Okay, good. Wow, thank you all for, well, thank you, Samantha, for those introductions, and I've always wanted to read at Bear Pond Books, so this is really special, and for me to read as part of Poem City, which is an amazing series of events, it's very exciting, and there's so many nice faces to see here tonight, and you all braved an ice storm, so that's great, and it is a complete honor for me to read with Bianca. And like most poets, my home is, I have tons and tons of poetry books, but I have a special shelf of poetry books in my bedroom, which is a small shelf of the poetry books that are the poets that I sort of most cherish and who really sustain me, and since I first made that little poetry shelf, I've had Ruth Stone Poetry Books, Bianca's grandma on that shelf, and then, hey you guys, come on in. And then in the last few years, nestled against the Ruth Stone Poetry Books on the shelf are the Bianca Stone Poetry Books on the shelf, so I thought it would be kind of fun to start the reading tonight by reading a couple small Ruth Stone poems that are my favorites. This one is called Mantra from The Next Galaxy, which is probably for sale here too. Mantra, when I am sad, I sing remembering the red wing black bird's clack, then I want no thing except to turn time back to what I had before love made me sad. When I forget to weep, I hear the peeping tree toads creeping up the bark, love lies asleep and dreams that everything is in its golden net, and I am caught there too when I forget. And then from this, in the dark collection, I wanted to read the poem called Bianca. On the cement belt over the cement playground, buses, cars, trucks move from one side to the other, hyphens of traffic, dashes from nowhere to nowhere. We sit on the benches under the sycamore, and in the almost indestructible play yard, Bianca finds a throng of dandelions. Her tenderness gathers them up, her yellow hair hanging over them, her astringent herbal essence, her small hands filling passions bitter cup. Now I want to read you some poems from my book, Steele, which came out in 2016. This is the first poem in the collection. It's called The Engineers Taught Us, to Check. One hundred times a day and tomorrow we will keep on checking. Everything is here. Messages, filters, compass, wisdom, music, news of the world, time of day everywhere, locators, something of my old life, the childhood neighbor's laugh burned patch from the shag rug of 1979, phone numbers of the dead. When I admitted that for months after his suicide, I left my brother voicemails. My sisters all said they had called him too. We are believers. Dear engineers, please put me in touch with those who have trespassed against me. The fortune teller will not take the engineer to be her lawfully wedded wife. Together they will not provide the navigation tools to fill me with a greenhouse of hibiscus. My smartphone offers no shelter. There is only building from the inside and it's necessary loneliness. It's a terrible machine that won't let me lose. Wherever the train I rode used to roll by here when I was on my way out of what I have since gone back to. I can still feel the strain of exile as the world slipped behind and see from the window the flat water of the lake as it replicated the sky. Purple, gray and pale yellow. We called it blue. Sometimes I would step off the platform and find the afternoon air had softened like a face asleep. Or I would turn from the memory of losing and their butter cups in the grass. The railroad bed is now rugged with ragweed, the old ties crumble into dirt. Follow this rail a long, long way and you'll never get to where I never got to either. Brother and sister. I noticed that Wednesday keeps repeating after a pause like rain. Time is the room I can't get out of. Only in sleep can I slip through the back door. In my dream, you are alive again. A sweet reprieve where I compose a new prelude. What you had of mine was not earned but inscribed in the face behind my face. A brother and sister are like magnets pulling and repelling each other. In our childhood games we named a safety and someone to be it. And we went back home again. I don't know what it is about bookstores but the bookstore readings are like the most quiet. Do people not breathe in books? Never like no one ever coughs. Fortune teller. What did I want from her? I already know one half of life is to build and the other half for wind to dismantle. I know a person's gate conveys the number of stones in their heart. I know history is being swallowed in the den of the television as the screens grow larger and larger until we will walk right into the picture. The fortune teller promised one day I would learn to stop breathing. One day I could close my eyes. Next time around I will be a city pigeon. Iridescent as a pearl I will spread out on the currents with my flock and scavenge along the cement. Please drop some crumbs for me. So as Samantha pointed out the theme of loss echoes through my poetry and certainly echoes through this collection steel. My mother died in a car accident when I was a child and this next couple of poems are about that. This one is called rings. My mother died young teaching me that the soul lives in costume jewelry and a broken watch. Flight repeats itself with brave conviction, a lesson in compassion on the walls of old buildings. Humiliation makes us better lovers. It makes us better shelters. I learned to build by tossing stones into water. All ghosts have the same thesis which can be heard deep from the throat of every morning sounding like an echo of your voice. This poem is called resemblance. The poinsettia bleeds milk from the broken leaf. Those are not blossoms. Snow fills in and covers up. You were reading a book about sisters talking. I write down everything we won't say, what we shared, the meals, hundreds, thousands even. Flank stick, shit on a shingle, fish sticks long before your house and pesto and you're a mother and I'm not and the snow comes back. People say we look alike but we spent years not being alike through all the sting and scrape of childhood, through all the smallness, all the nearness questions. At this point there are no surprises. Each comfort, each hurt falls where the groove is worn. I was four and you were seven and the snow caused it. Our story is so long it outlasts us. I'm going to bed on an air mattress on your daughter's bedroom floor. It's Christmas Eve. 40 years ago we slept on bunk beds in the brick house on Folkstone Drive while our parents argued and whispers on what would be their last night together. The snow had already begun. I would throw myself in front of a train for you. Isn't that the expression? But our story doesn't go like that. We were in the back seat and no one could stop the cars getting over the dotted line. It was Christmas and so it'll always be balsam and sugar and milk from a stem. I hated in the movies when they kill off the woman to make us love her. But it worked for our mother, didn't it? When I go by the sliding glass, I have an emergency room entrance and I glimpse the faces of two people leaning anxiously toward one another on stiff plastic chairs. I think that's you. That's me. So I'm going to read one more poem from Steele. I thought I'd read a few of my newer poems. This last poem I'm going to read is actually a poem about long love. Somebody told me I should always read this poem. It's a love poem for my partner of now 25 years, my wife Kelly. It's called Naming the Waves. Above the harbor, these clouds refuse to be described, except in the language with which they describe themselves. I stand here in the morning stillness, which is of course not a stillness, the sky spreading open to the east with amber light while drifting away to the west. Here I can sense how the world spins us precisely in its undetectable turn somehow both towards and away. The blue of the harbor holds the sky in its calm gaze. This is a love poem. Be patient. Between you and me, nothing leaves. Everything gathers. I will name for you each wave rolling up on the harbor sand. This is the first breath of sleep. This, the cloth of your mother's dress. This, the cadence of our long conversation. I want to show you how everything on this harbor has been broken. Shells, glass, rust, bones and rock crushed into this expanse of glittering sand, immune to ruin. Now rocking in the slow exhale of the tide. I'm going to just read a few newer poems before we get to hear Bianca's poems. This poem is called Coming Out. It was in Under Mountain. Thank you, Kaia. Coming out, I knew when the small plane I was riding in touched down in the fog. I knew watching my stepmother's hands work the rock carton behind the house. I didn't want the circle to close. I couldn't see myself in the dress so shaven. I knew because I love to move through water. The way it yielded, the way it took me in its mouth. I knew watching our fox hound when he slipped out of the leash, how he tore after sent down our shady street. I just wanted to sleep in the wild strawberries with my chopped off hair. This is a very new home. The working title is Drive Home on Route 22A on a Cold Day in April. From the passenger side window I spot a bald eagle shifting in high bare branches above stiff brown fields. We are trying not to talk about the family or the past. Sky finally clear after weeks suspended between rain and snow. I see an old brick house in the rear view mirror, half finished renovation with torn blue tarps thrashing in the wind. A year before he died, our father took us to an aviary where an injured bald eagle was brought to recover and sat flightless for years in a glass enclosure. What does it mean to be rescued? Let's pretend this is in a memory or a cage or a house cold with sadness. An eagle can live 20 years longer in captivity than in the wild. In one version of my life, no one left the house and nothing happened to us. So everything happened within us and it was just as bad. This is another new poem called To My Brother on the 10th anniversary of a suicide. Things I need to tell you, I cup against my chest like a messenger pigeon. Each accusation, each plea, each time another of our kin is losing ground. And then I toss them in the air in a chaos of silvered wings. When we were young, us kids took sides while the marriage that made us was played like a game of Jenga. Building blocks slid out one by one. Now there are no sides, no straight lines, no corners, and time swings around like a shadow nailed at my feet. Our time together comes in memory, the hour you spent gently untangling a thick snarl from the back of my childhood hair. And it shoves my heart further open on its stiff hinge, making you feel closer the longer you are dead. I'm going to end with another, with the spring poem I wrote last spring when it was a little more like spring. It's called Far North. Spring rolls in hard, swift, brash, heedless, box elder saplings, blackberry and burdock break ground any place we leave alone. A dozen dark purple tulips sprang up by the front steps. Did we plant them? Another gesture I can't remember. What I conceived, things I once said with such conviction, how I got from there to here. I'm not the person who moved here from Pittsburgh decades ago, but I feel her inside me earnest, righteous, drowning in want. I find a broken blue egg in front of our house and I want to ask my wife if she believes it is an omen of loss or a beginning. Sometimes I find her crying in the shower. I'm struck by all I can't take from her hands, like the water running between them. Thank you so much. At the Mobius Trip Club of Grief, come on in. The ladies are XXX. If you want the skinny ones, we got skeletons cracking around those poles. And over at the bar, there's grandma, her breasts hanging to her stomach, gorgeous with a shipman hat and murderous as a maxi pad. At the Mobius Trip Club of Grief, all the drinks are free. Grocery store rosé and gallon bottles on every table and the dead don't want your tips. They just want you to listen to their poems. Don't do anything dangerous and call every once in a while. In fact, they tip you at the MSCOG with checks. With a sigh, they'll throw one down at your feet. We make it rain with checks. Then the dead are sitting at the back of the club dying further, sniffing, shuffling into the bathroom, holding their skin in their hands, farting methane and sobbing across the stage with their last meal. It's the raciest show in town. And ladies, there's men too, hanging themselves on the bathroom doors and from the rafters, totally naked, with their cocks in their hands, tears coming down their faces. Ladies, you'll love how their feet smell, how their bones protrude, how they leave, no, no. It's so good to read with Allison whose book I just spent a lot of time with and adore. I feel such a kinship in our exploration of loss and family grief. So thank you, Allison. I thank you Matthew Dickman for being here, the editor of this book. I owe a lot to him for being in existence and if it's good, I owe him that too. That's up for debate. Laugh dance. I think everyone's glad I'm dead to the stripper with the cave in face. Her fingers were bone and no sinew. She flapped her arms at the two wrens caught up in the rafters staring down on the empty dance hall. Chirps rained like sparks from the electric saws in their hearts. No one is glad anyone is dead. But there's a certain comfort in knowing the dead can entertain us if we wish. We line up outside looking drowned telling whoever comes our way that we are falling very fast and that we are fine. The dead are wrinkled as jet streams cutting across the room with glasses lost on their heads. Vitamins dissolving like milk under their tongues. Their hair is still growing crackling out of their skulls and time lapse loops and we file in in ones and twos clinging to our tragedies finding our favorite face and it looks back at us was indifference contempt chill disappointment. You never came much when I was alive says one with red hair lying on her side about a jelly on the stage. And now you want a piece $20 for five minutes. I'll hold your hand in my own. I'll tell you you were good to me. I'm actually only going to read one more poem. It's sort of a longer poem and this poem meditates more on grief for the living. Which is just as massive. It's called Blue Jays. I haven't read this one out yet at a reading so you get to be the lucky test crowd. But I will say now thank you so much for coming and I love Montpelier so much and I don't know it's just it is crappy out so I applaud you for not making excuse up to yourself about not coming to poetry reading. Blue Jays. Great men will tell us how they rose from nothing but mom's a teenage heartbreak deadly bright Blue Jay in the snow. Her vivid black beak cleanly inside a flush of blue. She's a prologue the size of a whole book. She's real poppies that will make you sleep. So much motherland in her. I'm adrift in an age of not giving up. A fog lies over everything when she's upset. People used to live in the attic. Ones who snuck down when we went out to use the toilet and steal the spoons. Nothing's up there I said though I had no idea. Mom writing down license plates while we sat in the car outside the bakery eating croissants. So many similarities in numbers. It can be beauty to see. In the fields of Illinois mom danced topless for the soldiers headed to war. Probably be the last thing I see before I hit the shit one man told her. And blue here is a shell for you. Text messages like leaves on a river moving swiftly toward a vast sea of misunderstanding. Wouldn't it be nice to live more than one lifetime? I want to be someone else for a little while. I'm the village idiot Savant standing at an empty wishing well, lighting a joint and getting paranoid. Telling one yarn after another to anyone who will listen. Mom was always changing her name. Asking to be called something different. One day she went into the courthouse and wrote the name Blue Jay on a blank line. The Jay that will gather all the other J's when a dead one is found. Assemble the others to grieve. The name is still on her license like a hieroglyph unusable dust long ago gathered upon. Who are you? She asked one night standing beside the four poster bed in the dark. Who are you? You know me, don't you? I can't remember the words to that one lullaby. I've grown backwards and down. No room to sit. No private place to plunder tall as the tallest French bisque doll in the house. And I barely fit into this collection of genius never shipped into society. Only stockpiled for the end of the world. I bought her mind whispering and the motivation manifesto. I bought the life changing magic of tidying up. Left it among the Jewish mysticism books. And later it appeared in a pile by the front door. Take yourself help book back with you. She said filling a glass with ice and dive Pepsi like an ocean wave foaming over stones. My holes were empty like a cup in every hole the sea came up till it could come no more. Enough. Enough. Now I start my own cult. I lead some commune of rapture for these wounds, but it does no good. Everyone commits great big acts of suicide together in my head. Back during our Mormon days brief. Mom wouldn't let us go to temple out in Utah and baptize the dead. But I can baptize your father insisted who hanged himself all those years ago. He was a Jew. Mom says he doesn't want to be baptized into the three Mormon heavens. And that was that soon after we stopped attending and really I was glad I didn't want to baptize the dead so much as get into a swimming pool and be held down by a gentle hand of the priesthood. Your brother got too serious mom said smoking in the car in her old jacket with the elastic loops for shotgun shells and the flannel insert and loose M&Ms in the pockets. I loved her in that coat. He said he was he said I was sinning for drinking coffee. Nowadays it's like two cocktails and my endorphins are spent with a big shiny silver dollar and I'm an old doll the talks gibberish when pulled apart. I rush home with my golden ticket of shit and pass out in the empty tub. No one will talk about her father's death in a new way. It came out quietly that he liked to wear women's clothes. Tenderly mom tells me this. His unfinished dissertation crumbles in my hands. His poems from 1943 soldier ballads done with quivering golf pencils. I'm so alone. I'm so alone without you my darling. Oh I wish him on her. I wish him on her to be loved to be loved properly by a father probably feels great like winning a medal. There's so much joy in this poem. I'm trying to convey how much I love my mother the way I love birds. The blue J always is the biggest bird around the feeder makes a strange loud song a little aggressive but gorgeous known for its intellectual complex social systems with tight family bonds a biblical fondness for acorns spreading oak trees into existence after the last glacial period. What are those immigrant Lithuanian Jews who all married Goyam with red hair. After his wife died great uncle Jack your father's brother wouldn't throw anything out filling his house with newspapers and New Yorkers but oh his saders in Baltimore we screamed through so happy the delicious sounds of his muttering Hebrew can we go back. This poem was for you hoarders of my blood. The gentle climate of mothers that shakes the White House and other times drives you insane with silence the silent treatment the defining absence of noise like an expanding stain damp and long a face of need need the more forceful the longer it gets typing out sad sentences like a telegram into the hands of the wrong person my sweet placemat I place at my table each day when I sit down with a blue J the seeds fall out of my mouth do you know the game the game is leading you out of the dark and then you long to go back in or blowing on your hands to make a fire or building something on top of another thing and one is more fragile than the other my sister and I are stars in our own reality show that no one watches but us his mom responded spread out in our newton banter waiting for our relationship to really begin to be loved without a fight with a calm center not passing a mood around like a screaming infant this black market DVD collection that cannot be watched except when the moon is waning and no one paid the electric bill and they're threatening to take the house and the hostile cats are locked in the bathroom and then you can't look away for anything watch me loving you forever on the strip of land we call grief but it's only life do you know the game the game is being called unhappy just in case or gratitude as a weakness and we play it sometimes when there is nothing else to do thunder and lightning outside turns to reverence realizing your parents are just human is a large part of mature development some people never get there and being there is ever-rescent suddenly this need for honey and everything seasickness bends on my wrists remind me of my old perversity blackout incisions on the skin and injury open eyes shaped women's shame shaped get up out of the internet lawnmower man I'm concerned about the way we keep looking for something to ease the pain I'm not yet like a navy seal the way they love it when things are miserable living is enduring painful situations that living is not really reality which we know is such a lark mom don't we an exotic bird comes to solve herself in the back cloth of ash trees and I dream again I am so articulate with my vicious insults grief for the living will ruin your appetite how much to bird species watch other bird species like blue terriers Emily Dickinson said of the Jays mimicking the cry of a hawk the old world Jay who will intuit his female state of mind and find her the food she most desires the Jay will watch closely and keep track being loved depends upon it I've been watching you from this damp branch the wily sun across your cell and face your bones among your features your mouth curl beautiful angry a child's lips that world on a world on a word your sisters from the same Edenic womb who crossed the Red Sea the maddening mother cannot reason together the Jays scatter across the country surviving on the delicacy of larvae the feed swings like a crystal pendulum saying yes I miss you in this world I said to you yesterday sitting on the couch while you threaded tiny Italian imported beads onto a string in your manner of magnificent lamps illuminating the veil Dickinson noticed hovering over the imperfectly beheld face fluttering with your outbreath cigarette smug an old wound reddening around you your genius trapped like a moth on the screened in porch of your pain waiting in your house for a miracle oh mother it will never come without your consent mothers are all I've ever known and my loyalty never amassed enough my labyrinth my confusion of Jays my cacophonous aggression university of humor and ingenious abilities and I come back again and again to hang out and argue dearest playmate won't you come out and play with me I'm dead and in hell I've known that for years you say and I step quietly back into the night thank you so much questions with the mic I noticed like five blue Jays in my yard this morning and they told you to read that well not the most beautiful sending but their view what was the earliest seed for the strip club of grief well the Ruth had a poem called the Mobius strip of grief and she wrote a lot about the loss of her husband who died very young violently as well as her family members that she had all lost by the time I was alive and after I was very close with her and after she passed away I started reading a lot of allergies in response and going back to her poetry and I was struck by just how I felt like I was almost taking a torch of grief from her because it felt so accurate and I never understood that accuracy yet even for this small loss it wasn't as sort of violent as her loss and it got me thinking about just the sort of endlessness that's passed down through family to family of a sort of tragedy big or small true or not true it doesn't really matter but just families hold on to this and can pass it down to their children and their children are sort of expected to take it on it comes as sort of like big myth mythology that's very important to the whole structure of the family and so out of that one poem and sort of my own experiences with grief it all came out it was obviously a pun that happened in my head and I just ran with it without much intention and thinking you would never see the light of day making it rain to check yeah obviously you know times are different but when all we know that growing up it was very much checks you know like get a check from grandma you know now it's what about the joint Mitchell in there here's a shell for you yeah well I think that came from just that my mom was very of that time period and the song is called blue and it's a blue jay that's how to me that sounds very connected with my relationship with her so I should think that's the song no that's not green but that whole album is very painful in some ways I think it's green for the daughter for the husband the father of the father I was assumed it was the father of the baby shoot I think that students who are writing fiction poetry should study psychology instead of literature you know it doesn't even matter so I know you've been asked this question in a million different ways like how it forms so I guess I'm trying I'm going to ask them what you haven't asked before but I'm sure there's no way but like what when you're sitting in a session with a patient you know you mean and are you a restruct and to respond in poems you know what I mean is there is there a continuity between those two things for you I guess and vice versa maybe you know I would say to a poem as a psychologist you know I would say for the most I mean for the most part the they're very different parts of my brain and they stay pretty separate I feel like the language and the way that I communicate as a therapist is you know like a completely different vocabulary and it's like trying to see and speak as clearly and directly as possible and I feel like as a poet I'm almost like trying not to see too clearly so I can see what's under and under and sort of access the subconscious more so for the most part I feel like they're very separate parts of my life and parts of my brain they balance each other well but every once in a while I'll be in a session and it's not like usually like the whole like a stult of what the client's saying but they might like say one phrase like wow that was a really good phrase people might have to use that and on the flip when after you've written the poem and you've tried to obfuscate yourself from yourself and from the work does the therapist step in I mean I don't try to psychoanalyze myself at all I didn't say they stepped in well but yeah I mean not really I guess there's always that sort of a little bit of that frame I have a very sort of psychological perspective and I'm sure that that comes out but I think that with my poetry I'm always I feel like a lot I'm trying to deal in poetry with things maybe I'm not ready to deal with in other ways so I don't want to look too hard I'm trying not to look too hard and if I do look too hard then it's probably going in the recycle then because I think that I think I'm ready to address things in poetry before I'm ready to really address them more directly I remember being in workshop and being like oh this is how you turn workshop into free therapy because everybody's like interpreting your poem and like telling it back to you and you can't say anything and it's like always all this stuff comes out and you're like oh my god this isn't a poem about my father I didn't even realize what makes a poem about grieving or about grief not work like what are some things that you think either help or hurt in your work in writing about grief what do you think? well all what I would say about that is that like for me like a lot of the allergies that didn't work that I wrote felt to like sort of feeling or like not unique enough and I think that they were good for me to write for myself and like I had to write them and I didn't want to stop myself from doing it but I felt like I didn't want to I didn't want to like share it with anybody unless I was like doing it justice and sometimes that meant holding back a little bit of maybe what was more personal emotional sentimental I think it's sentimental such an inherited vocabulary around grief it is hard to be original about it I mean love too it's the same well everything important to write about is hard to write I think that for me I don't that whole like like when I watch really scary things on TV or movies I do that thing and I feel like that is what I do a little bit when I'm writing and I think that there's a part of me that doesn't want to be writing about what I'm writing about and I know like when I with steel when I first put it together I try like not that they aren't like almost like all grief poems but I tried to like somehow hide them all in the back of the manuscript and I remember like when I finally talked to you know I got some advice about it and the poet was like why are you hiding all your good poems in the back of the manuscript and what are these like really empty poems that you're putting in the front and I'm like you see the smokescreen and then similarly with my new manuscript I'm working on which I got like I was really lucky and I won in this like lottery fundraiser thing for the root stone thing I got like Bianca Stone to look at which basically gave me very similar advice like these are all poems about grief and I was like this one too you know so I think you can embrace it and I think it's helpful yeah it's like this is what it is and so I don't you know I have a hard time even finding poems that aren't about grief but I think I I think I try to apologize for them or hide them but I think that all of us are grieving so much and I think there is a hunger for poems and I think it's like nice for me to read with Bianca and read this like gorgeous book that is saying like this is about grief and realizing that I can just sort of move towards that and embrace it even though I mean you know I think anything vulnerable I mean nothing can really be good if it doesn't have vulnerability but the vulnerability also makes it hard I find it very hard to judge that's what my poetry group is for you guys do you have a question I think that the way that both of you are talking about you're dead actually makes them come alive longer so poetry is like seance and the poem engineer that Allison where you mentioned that you're talking you're calling your mother and I'm wondering at what stage that was because I've been trying that I've been texting and calling for three and a half years since my mother died and it's been very good for me to do that I recently told her about a cool family event and I got a response a text that from somebody who inherited her phone a moment I thought it was mom but I assumed that when you wrote that there was no texting or the danger of that happening well I did I mean I did leave it was actually my brother and I did leave for quite a while after he died and there was a point at which at one point I called and it was somebody else and the number was gone that was kind of hard I guess I can't do this anymore well I think it is like especially for Ruth it was definitely almost a problem with her being unable to let go of her dead it wasn't a problem as a writer because as a writer she produced so much rich poetry that we were able to like get a lot out of this as readers but I think it was almost the same as texting somebody who said to be spending the rest of your life writing poems to them I don't know it is keeping them alive in a certain way it's such a big difference in like how people deal with grief whether or not you're going to sort of decide to move on and let it be passed and I think both are valid of course but for writers it's it's harder probably I have a quick question do you have a recollection of an article that appeared in Vermont Life Magazine about your grandmother that had a gorgeous color photograph of I assume your mom I think it was all three sisters maybe 20 maybe more years ago this vivid color photograph full page all these flaming red heads and I remember loving the article I don't know if Tom Slayton wrote it or who but I can't remember the article now but that image I can't find the magazine it's somewhere but in fact I'm trying to find out if I can access it if I don't find it it was it was a it was a photograph that I never forgot and never left my mind because it was this mother and this fabulous poet and these two three gorgeous long red-haired women with very like pictures and lamps shades and things on the walls that were but exquisite and I always wondered whatever happened that sums it up to that did you have did you ever read that article? yeah I had a poem in it I remember I was in high school I was a senior in high school and I I had a poem in it and it was a grammatical error that's so great but yeah it was like it was great I remember that very well do you think of it now in this conversation as idyllic improbable and not a depiction of I was so stunned with that the idea of all these artists women and mothers and daughters I love that I think that's the greatest thing about I'm trying to carry it on definitely like we're fixing up my grandmother's house I turn it into a writer's space and carry on that bohemian long red-haired woman way of you know just bringing poetry into the household and I bring my daughter with me to a lot of events and I want to completely share my poetry world with her and it's what my grandma did really well one of the greatest things she did was just she was so open with her poetry with her daughters and with her students and just creating this whole space for people to come together and I mean that's beautiful to me and that's something I definitely want to carry on as much as I can for other people and for my family for sure does your grandmother's poetry inspire you more than challenge you or in any way affect you in this with a sense of no it's just only inspiring and wonderful I mean I feel a huge reverence for her poetry her favorite poet I like to think of being in conversation with her poetry instead of it being competitive because I know her voice is so deeply ingrained in me and you know my mom and my aunts as well and their art and stuff like that so it's just ingrained in me so I don't want to fight it or try and top it or anything like that I just want to sort of honor it and have it be it's part of me this book is certainly in conversation with my grandmother's poetry and I decided to embrace that and it was actually wonderful creatively thank you guys I'll show you