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In-Store Poetry Reading: Brittney Corrigan and Jessica Pierce
August 8, 2022 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
FreeAnnie Bloom’s welcomes Portland poets Brittney Corrigan and Jessica Pierce to read from their new collections. Corrigan’s latest is Daughters, and Pierce’s is Consider the Body, Winged.
This in-store reading is first come, first served. Please be mindful of any store health policies that might be in effect on the night of the reading.
Signed and personalized copies are available! Please, please, please include the name for personalization in the order notes; all orders without a name specified in the order notes will be signed only.
About Daughters:
This collection reimagines characters from mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and pop culture from the perspective of their daughters––daughters we don’t expect such individuals to have, as we don’t usually think of Bigfoot, the Mad Hatter, or Medusa as parents. The persona poems in Daughters give voice to the guilt, resentment, and anger that may come with raising a child as well as explore the intertwining of these shameful feelings with pride and love. These figures are a new visioning, from the daughters’ perspective, of what it means to shape another human being. Taking on such topics as aging, rebellion, loss, domestic violence, homelessness, and gender identity, the voices of Daughters aim to upend the reader’s conceptions of the characters and throw light upon what it means for a girl to come out from under her parents as a woman of her own making.
Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks, and most recently, Daughters. Solastalgia, a collection of poems exploring climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene age, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2023. Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon, for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection.
About Consider the Body, Winged:
“Consider the Body, Winged is a paradoxical wonder . . . On difficult subjects—incarceration, hauntings, & nervous daughter’s tender queries––Jessica Pierce writes with elegant accessibility, putting our fragile human existence into a ratio of perspective. As soon as the final stanza stopped reverberating in my heart—it was as if I didn’t have a choice—I started over.”
—Kevin Phan, author of Dears, Beloveds
“Jessica Pierce’s poems have a kinship with the birds and insects she often summons in them—the red paper wasp, a hummingbird . . . Her work has the winged creature’s trick of inhabiting the moment while engaged in the necessary, future-focused activity of building the nest and nurturing the young.”
—Nan Cohen, author of Unfinished City
A Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominee, Jessica E. Pierce has poems in magazines including CALYX Journal, Bellingham Review, Tar River Poetry, Euphony, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Nimrod International Journal selected her as a finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She was a finalist in the 2020 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize from CALYX Journal, a finalist in New Ohio Review’s 2019 NORward Prize for Poetry, a finalist in the 2019 MVICW Poetry Contest, and the recipient of a 2019 MVICW Poet Fellowship.