Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic on Zoom Featuring Joan Renee Boswell

NOTE: Due to circumstances beyond everyone’s control, this month’s reading will take place over Zoom. Email christopherjluna@gmail.com by no later than 3 pm on July 9 to indicate your interest in participating. In the subject line, let us know if you are “Reading” or “Just Listening.” You will receive instructions for how to join the meeting. Open mic readers are invited to share one poem for three minutes or less.

If you are willing to donate to support the series, please use Christopher Luna’s PayPal (christopherjluna@gmail.com) and include a memo stating that the money is for Ghost Town Poetry.

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic
Hosted by Christopher Luna, Toni Lumbrazo Luna, & Morgan Paige
Featuring Joann Boswell

7 pm
Thursday, July 9
On Zoom

$5 Suggested donation
No one turned away for lack of funds

LGBTQ+ FRIENDLY, PRO-SCIENCE, ANTI-FASCIST,
ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004

Please support Niche Wine Bar, whose owner, Leah Jackson, has provided a home for us since 2015, by ordering food to go: nichewinebar.com

Joann Renee Boswell is a teacher, theater director, mother, photographer, and poet. She lives in Camas, Washington, with her partner and three children. Joann graduated with a Choose Your Own Adventure B.A., featuring music, theater, and writing/literature. Later she became a master at teaching (ask her former students!). Joann loves rainy days filled with coffee, books, handholding, moody music, and sci-fi shows. While her poetry has appeared in over a dozen journals, this is her first book. Find out more at https://joannrenee.com/cosmic-pockets/

Order the book here: http://www.barclaypressbookstore.com/Cosmic-Pockets.html

Book description: What if Mary wasn’t really a virgin? Could Jesus be an alien from another planet? How do we know we’re not all living inside of God? Poet and photographer Joann Renee Boswell invites us to travel with her into an encounter with the inconvenient complexities of earth-life and outer space, politics and religion, Bigfoot, feminism, Santa Claus, and spirituality – all tucked inside the Cosmic Pockets of life. Simultaneously whimsical and serious, Cosmic Pockets traces Joann’s personal journey out of evangelical Christianity and into an evolving understanding of faith – what if the universe is out to help us? Into motherhood – do my children exist when I’m not there? And into love – do I have a superpower? Unflinchingly honest and delightfully conflicted, the dense narrative of Cosmic Pockets will complicate your understanding of what the world is and gift you with narrow glimpses of what might be.

Cosmic Pockets is the thrilling manifesto of a goddess aflame with righteous fury at the misogyny and hypocrisy of Christianity’s Madonna-Whore double standard. Her radical feminist vision exposes the unrealistic expectations imposed upon women which results in an internalization of unwarranted shame. Joann Boswell’s heroic verse, sharp wit, and exquisite photos of everyday life become “sacraments of action” illuminating the actual romance to be found in marriage as well as the joys and challenges of motherhood. Marvel as I did at this candid and fearless poet determined “to say all the words, each holy.” Christopher Luna, inaugural Poet Laureate of Clark County, WA and founder of Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic