LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.
For details regarding specific events please contact the organizers or venues. If you are an organizer or venue and would like to reach out to us please feel free to contact us or submit an event using our submission form. We’d love to hear from you!
- This event has passed.
In-Store Poetry Reading: Dianne Stepp and Judith Montgomery
January 23, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
FreeAnnie Bloom’s welcomes Portland poets Dianne Stepp and Judith Montgomery for an in-store reading from their latest collections.
About The Nest’s Dark Eye:
Some traditions believe a grieving woman-given her vulnerability, given the boundless expanse of her sorrow-stands at the spirit world’s threshold. Grief gives her a kind of holiness, a sacred compassion and perception. Dianne Stepp’s voice possesses such a power. Her poems are finely crafted, deeply musical lamentations for her son who committed suicide. Her poems are grateful paeans to the natural world’s bounty and grace. A poet-mother trying to fathom her son’s final, devastating actions, she’s “craning to see, twisting / to search the shape / of his death.” The Nest’s Dark Eye offers us sorrow’s keen insight, its fraught and luminous beauty.–Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita
Dianne Stepp lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, most recently Tar River Poetry, Sugar House Review, Gyroscope Review, Cider Press Review and Comstock Review. Her chapbooks “Half-Moon of Clay” and “Sweet Mercies” were published by Finishing Line Press in 2006 and 2017 respectively.
About Mercy:
Judith Montgomery chronicles the story of caring for her a husband as he endures cancer treatment. Though brutal in its technology, the medical world Montgomery describes is merciful in its human form, peopled by chemotherapy nurses whose expertise is matched by mercy, as they lift the plumped / sac, poisons mixed to pour fire into flesh. Anyone who has had even the least brush with cancer will find here an honest and hopeful world, where suffering is lightened by the sight of butterflies, mutable flames that glide as we– / refugees from the cancer center, / and stunned by treatment– / … glide in luxurious / light, afloat in paradise.
Judith H. Montgomery‘s poetry workshops include poetry as a healing agent. Her poems appear in The Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, and the Tahoma Literary Review, as well as in a number of journals and anthologies. Her first collection, Passion, received the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Red Jess appeared in 2006 from Cherry Grove Collections and her chapbook, Pulse & Constellation, appeared in 2007 from Finishing Line Press. Her second full-length book, Litany for Wound and Bloom, was published by Uttered Chaos Press in 2018.