Sunday afternoon, June 3rd at 3 p.m., the Poetrio monthly reading series continues with Donna Lisle Burton, Alice Osborn, and Erica Wright. Details here [link].

From Malaprop’s community outreach director, Virginia McKinley:

Poet and visual artist Donna Lisle Burton. . . . has two previous collections of poems; is also an accomplished painter, portraitist, and photographer; and has four decades of experience as a special education teacher. Of Donna Lisle Burton’s third collection of poems, LETTING GO, award-winning Asheville poet Pat Riviere-Seel has written, “Do not be misled by the title: once you start reading, there will be no Letting Go [sic].”  North Carolina Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers has offered this additional appreciation: “Reading the poems of Donna Lisle Burton is like happening upon a cache of tender and beautifully crafted love letters.  Among the objects of her most intimate affections are lovers both old and new — parents and siblings and children; students and friends; flowers and bridges and mills.  And, finally, her luckiest of lovers, whoever might open the pages of this exquisite book.”  The variations on letting go that are gathered in this collection are not entirely beautiful or easy, and not always for the reasons one might anticipate. . . .

Alice Osborn is another transplant to North Carolina. . . . AFTER THE STEAMING STOPS is her most recent collection of poetry; previous collections are Right Lane Ends, and Unfinished Projects.  The latter prompted these remarks from writer Homer Hickam: “I love Alice’s poetry.  She gives me thoughts I’ve never thought, and dreams I’ve never dreamed.  She uses words like a master potter — molding the clay of the mind into vessels that hold not things, but life, place, and time.”  AFTER THE STEAMING STOPS seems a book more of broken dreams than of new or unexpected ones.  There is no sentimentality in the face of death, departures, endings. . . Before the fierceness of nature and life, love becomes fierce — but after the fact, and nearly as helpless as the child who declared, “I’ll find my own way!” — and bicycled off as a tornado approached, “no clue dueling cyclones ate children / near the road he and Daddy drive on every day to school.”

Erica Wright. . . . serves as poetry editor for Guernica, a magazine of art and politics, and teaches creative writing at Marymount Manhattan College. . . . Of her 2011 book, INSTRUCTIONS FOR KILLING THE JACKAL, Christopher Crawford observed in a recent review for the literary magazine Neon, “Wright is not afraid to use the darkest of imagery combined with a violence of language. A great number of the poems here are in tercets and couplets and Wright makes good use of these forms[,] which allows her to move her short, sharp-edged anecdotes with disquieting ease from beginning to end. Wright’s poems often follow the tracks of her thoughts through various twists, turns and enjambments. The darkness that informs these images is always just below the surface, the music in the lines is subtle and tense . . . The poems give a sense of someone trying to find something while at the same time avoiding it, leaving the scene while simultaneously confronting it. . . .”  Erica Wright’s imagery, settings, and situations often recall the elements of tall tales — but tales whose paths soon wind toward mythical landscapes, the unsettling territory and characters of fables, a realm of constant metamorphosis and of faith mingled with superstition. . .

Hope to see you at this month’s Poetrio reading series.