Poetry Reading: Sara Quinn Rivara and Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet

Annie Bloom’s welcomes local poets Sara Quinn Rivara and Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet to read from their latest collections.

Animal Bride is the second collection of poems from Portland poet Sara Quinn Rivara. “‘Not the drowned girl but the swimming one, ‘ Rivara writes in Animal Bride. These poems are written at the crossroads of womanhood: to be a woman in captivity or a woman breaking free. Like a 21st century Persephone, the woman at the heart of Animal Bride journeys out of the underworld of a violent marriage to find strength in her animal self. Bride, wife, mother, lover–Rivara wrestles with many forms of being female, and summons the natural elements of fire and ice, air and water, to become a shapeshifter. I found myself reveling in the lyric energy of these lines, and how the voice grows brasher, more authoritative, more courageous. Poem after poem, there’s a gathering strength and resilience. This is a powerful story of womanhood and transformation–between hell and hope, fear and freedom, silence and singing.”–Ansel Elkins

In The Greenhouse, Portland poet Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet details the dual desires of new motherhood the struggle to make peace with both connection and separation, with being a self irrevocably tied to another self. In lines both fluid and broken, delicate and irreverent, these lyrics recount with boundless love the difficulty of finding oneself again as a parent, and the elemental joy of being transformed by the very life that tethers you.