Poetry reading: Amber West, Jennifer Perrine, Kelly Terwilliger

Amber West is a writer, educator, and theater maker originally from California with roots in Tennessee and Oklahoma. Her full-length poetry collection, Hen & God was published in 2017 and described by the Washington Independent Review of Books as “out of the ordinary writing.”

Greed and destruction have reigned too long! Artists, humans, Portlanders, it’s time we EGG UP!

Join poets Jennifer Perrine, Kelly Terwilliger, and Amber West at the delightful Rose City Book Pub for a free evening of poetry, conversation, and revelry. Amber is in town as part of the Oregon leg of her national #EggUp poetry book tour.

See below for poet bios and book info. Please spread the word and we hope to see you there!

About the Poets:

Jennifer Perrine is the author of three books of poetry: No Confession, No Mass; In the Human Zoo; and The Body Is No Machine. A fourth book, Again, is forthcoming from Airlie Press in 2020. Honors include the 2019 Oregon Poetry Community Fellowship from Literary Arts, the 2017 K. Margaret Grossman Fiction Award, and the 2016 Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award. For more information, visit www.jenniferperrine.org.

Kelly Terwilliger grew up on the Oregon Coast, and is the author of a chapbook of poems, A Glimpse of Oranges (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and a full-length collection, Riddle Fish Hook Thorn Key (Airlie Press, 2016). She currently lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she works as an oral storyteller and poet/artist-in-residence in public schools. For more info, visit http://www.airliepress.org/riddle.

Amber West is a poet and educator who grew up on the central coast of California. She is the author of Hen & God (The Word Works, 2017), Daughter Eraser (Finishing Line Press, 2015), as well as numerous plays and “puppet poems” that have been performed nationally. West lives in southern California and teaches writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. For more info, visit www.amberiwest.com #eggup / #radicaloptimism / #whitmania2019

About our Books:

Jennifer Perrine’s “No Confession, No Mass is lyrical, inventive, and full of surprises, offering us fresh ways of seeing old stories. The music is a delight throughout—agile and apt—language enjoying itself! Jennifer Perrine writes: ‘and returned her whole, startled raw, launched her back into the world.’ This is what fine poetry can do—and No Confession, No Mass does it.” —Ellen Bass, author of Like a Beggar

The poems in Kelly Terwilliger’s Riddle Fish Hook Thorn Key invite readers into encounters with what doesn’t stay still. The longing here is not only to see things—the bones of a whale, a forgotten handkerchief, muddy horses in a field, a forsaken boy on an empty playground—but to inhabit them, to enter the well of other lungs, to journey into the throat of a land [we] didn’t know. These poems search for ways to belong in the world, and as they do so, the fleeting and uncertain become illuminated—and intimate.

Tearing into our ugliness to find beauty, tearing open the “known” to find mystery, the muscular voice of poet Amber West exposes our contemporary madness and looks for the cure. Through persona poems from a dizzying array of characters, Hen & God becomes a portrait of life in America now, unflinching and loving and bold. The scope of suffering that West addresses will stun the reader, but her linguistic skill makes this an exhilarating rather than a despairing exploration. She reminds us that consciousness—that art—is larger than suffering, is our redemption. “West is a kick-ass poet with a big heart…This is out of the ordinary writing.” —Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

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