In-Store Poetry Reading: Kristin Berger, Cathy Cain, John Miller

Annie Bloom’s welcomes Portland area poets Kristin Berger, Cathy Cain, and John Miller for an in-store reading from their new collections, all published by local press The Poetry Box.

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.

About Earthwork:

The poetry of Kristin Berger’s Earthwork is centered around, sprung from, and located in the landscape of mothering during the increasingly mapless territory of climate change and the pandemic. These are poems that take careful care of the small wonders of childhood and parenthood against such large and looming realities; poems that never stray away from wide-eyed honesty, taking in grief, joy, memory, and the strangeness of life, equally. Poems that stay put on the earth, show us with their small mappings a few ways of doing the necessary work.

Kristin Berger is the author of the poetry collections Refugia (Persian Pony Press, 2019), Echolocation (Cirque Press, 2018), How Light Reaches Us (Aldrich Press, 2016), and For the Willing (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and a collaborative poetry and print book, Woman & Changing Man: A High Desert Myth (Nightjar Press, 2022), with Eugene, Oregon printmaker Diane Sandall. Recipient of residencies from Playa, OSU’s Spring Creek Project (Shotpouch and H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest), and Starkey Experimental Forest and Range, Kristin’s work is influenced by Oregon’s High Desert, Cascades, Coastal Range and all the Pacific Northwest’s wild and interconnected landscapes. Kristin lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family.

About The Weight of Clouds:

The Weight of Clouds is an intimate celebration of how our spirit is surprised and enlarged at the moment of perception, when the weight of reality is balanced by that of our imagination. Cathy Cain’s words, phrases, and images dissipate, then reemerge like shifting cloud formations. She observes the openings where mystery flows through us like a luminous current. Even as Cain quietly addresses the impermanence of our bodies, she focuses on the amazement, the near impossibility, of our existence and the wonder of love. Her poems are a reflection on how we create the beauty that we need to survive.

Poet and artist Cathy Cain is the author of A Shape of Sky (2021) and Bee Dance (2019), both from The Poetry Box; and Empty Space Places You (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her honors include the Kay Snow Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry; the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry; and a First Place from the Oregon Poetry Association poetry contest. Cain’s poetry has appeared in The Poeming Pigeon, Reed Magazine, Verseweavers, VoiceCatcher, and in  /pãn| dé | mïk/ 2020: An Anthology of Pandemic Poems. Cain taught in the public schools for over thirty years. She is the lucky wife of a sweet man, and the mother of two fine sons. She lives with her husband near Portland, Oregon.

About Olympic:

Olympic is collection of personal, persona, and pandemic poems inspired by various Greek mythological tales, guided by Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths. Throughout the book, John Miller masterfully employs this mythology as a creative vehicle to both witness and contemplate the current realities of life against a backdrop of history and legend.

John L. Miller‘s poetry was featured at the Elisabeth Jones Art Center’s 2021 Festival of Feelings.  His poetry has also appeared in West Trade Review, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Wingless Dreamer, Wax Poetry and Art, Third Wednesday: A Literary & Arts Journal, Not a Pipe Publishing’s anthology Shout, River Heron Review, catheXis northwest press, The Esthetic Apostle, the 9Bridges anthology Over Land and Rising, and Glass Facets of Poetry.  His short fiction has appeared in Tethered by Letters. John is a founder of Portland Ars Poetica, a literary poetry collective serving the U.S. Pacific Northwest and when virtual, anywhere. Portland Ars Poetica’s activities include generative workshops, a book club and performance events. John has lived in Portland, Oregon since 2012, where he started to write poetry after writing almost nothing in verse for 20 years. A writer from as far back in childhood as he can remember and has files on, John was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.  He wrote his first poem at fifteen, on the New York City subway, on a bookmark that he placed in a copy of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, which remains on his shelves.  He has a degree in English from Amherst College.