Livestream Poetry Reading: Megan Alpert, Amelia Diaz Ettinger, Jennifer Perrine

Annie Bloom’s welcomes Northwest poets Megan Alpert, Amelia Díaz Ettinger, and Jennifer Perrine for a livestream reading from their new collections, published by Portland’s own Airlie Press.

Register here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/poetry-reading-megan

Pre-signed copies of all books will be available for pickup, local delivery, or shipping.

In Washington state poet Megan Alpert’s The Animal at Your Side, narrators scavenge for clues, trying to stitch together a life in the midst of unrootedness. Finding bones, talismans, and half-heard voices that portal back to both personal and collective history, the speakers are haunted by diaspora, family estrangement, intergenerational trauma, and resilience. What are the costs of being far away from a homeplace? What are the costs of returning? And when the costs are too high on both sides, how do you choose?

Oregon poet Amelia Díaz Ettinger’s Learning to Love a Western Sky is a reflection of the assimilation of the immigrant into the host landscape. It is the transition from nostalgia to integration and the review of aging, loving, and betrayal in this foreign home. Born in Mexico and raised in Puerto Rico, Amelia Díaz Ettinger writes poems that reflect the struggle with identity often found in immigrants.

Portland poet Jennifer Perrine’s Again riffs on common words—tremendous, terrific, disaster, wall, ban—that have been overused and misused in recent years, made to carry the weight of disturbing connotations. In poems that speak through both a collective voice and a singular, personal one, Again maps the emotional territories of this specific—but not unique—moment in United States history. Jennifer Perrine’s poems trace a path through this surreal landscape, illuminating a terrain of disorientation, grief, and shame at the America we have made. Again is an anthem, a reckoning for the “land of the smack that makes us see stars, home of the belt that stripes our backs.”