Please join us Thursday, June 7, 2018, at 7:00 pm, when poets Alice B. Fogel and Kerrin McCadden will read for the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Alice B. Fogel

Alice B. Fogel is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. In addition to Strange Terrain, a reader’s guide to appreciating poetry without necessarily “getting” it, she is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, A Doubtful House (2017). Others include Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” which won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature and the New Hampshire Literary Award in Poetry, and Be That Empty, a national bestseller. A nine-time Pushcart nominee and recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship and other awards, her poems appear in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry and Poet’s Choice. She works with students with learning disabilities at Landmark College in Putney, Vermont, and hikes mountains whenever possible.

Kerrin McCadden

Kerrin McCadden is the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, winner of the 2015 Vermont Book Award and the 2013 New Issues Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry and in such journals as American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. She is the associate director of The Frost Place’s Conference on Poetry and Teaching and teaches at Montpelier High School. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont.

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PARALLAX / Alice B. Fogel

What compass? What rose
layered & complex with bloom & opening? I’ll fold
the cardinal directions into my bones,
take turns facing thirty-two points of grief petaling
one by one up the ladder of thorns that spirals through links
in the fence. If I could I would
ship out slowly overnight, rearrange the magnetic
variations of ever: Stay: Go: Both: So movement scents the sails
as they skim the half-winds & fix stars.
By our old beliefs, a history of bridges & burnings:
moving: a memory of place erasing elsewhere.
What vine would double back & unclasp the light
when the red crested bird
flies true north? What bittersweet? What beacon? What relief.

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HOMING / Kerrin McCadden

The sky is at the feeder again.
I mean the indigo bunting
with no bearings for home.
A man pulls into the driveway

after work—crunching stones,
hallooing up the stairs—
wanting to know about my day.
All the days are wranglers,

I say. I am not able to cite
my sources, but I make a list.
A woman at lunch said we do not
plan to live two hundred years,

and so I think to tell him
—well, I do not plan to live
two hundred years! In my hands,
pillowcases I bought, embroidery

floss. Everywhere I go I think
about what is impossible.
Can homing pigeons carry
their nth letter and still get lost?

My job is to build a home,
I tell this man I have already built
a home with. My job is to do
something with my hands.

(First published in Four Way Review)

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