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Matthew Zapruder in Conversation With Alana Csaposs

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

The poems in Matthew Zapruder’s fifth collection, Father’s Day (Copper Canyon), ask how one can be a good father, partner, and citizen in the early 21st century. Zapruder, author of Why Poetry, deftly improvises upon language and lyricism as he passionately engages with these questions during turbulent, uncertain times. Whether interrogating the personalities of the Supreme Court, watching a child grow off into a distance, or tweaking poetry critics and hipsters alike, Zapruder maintains a deeply generous sense of humor alongside a rich vein of love and moral urgency. Zapruder will be joined in conversation by Alana Csaposs, Tin House online editor.

Free

Poetry Slam and Open Mic feat. Sabrina Benaim

Tiny's Coffee - NE MLK Jr 2031 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for another amazing poetry slam and open mic!!! This slam is a qualifying slam for the Women of the World Poetry Slam Finals. There is a 5 dollar suggested donation for this event but no one is turned away. We will have a feature from Sabrina Benaim! We will be at our venue, Tiny's Coffee Northeast! This means our show is all-ages! Everyone is welcome. We do not censor our mic except for instances of hate-speech. Please also note that we start a little earlier then at previous venues. Accessibility info: Tiny's is on the 6 bus line, which is a frequent service line. It is a quarter mile from the the streetcar line and about a half mile away from the max.…

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Free – $5

Sandra Yannone and Alissa Hattman

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

Sandra Yannone joins us at 7 pm on Tuesday, September 24th, to read from her debut poetry collection Boats for Women, published by Salmon Poetry. Reading with Yannone will be Portland poet Alissa Hattman. Using a range of free verse and traditional forms, Yannone’s poems plot intersections and transgressions of the personal and the historical like a cartographer drafting a nautical chart, along the way documenting how women discover and recover from the intimacies of loving each other through time. Yannone grew up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her poems, book reviews, and articles have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Seattle Review, and The Gay and Lesbian Review. Her work has received the Academy of American Poets Prize and…

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Free

Ladies of Leisure Book Club

Two Rivers Bookstore 8836 N Lombard Street, Portland, OR, United States

The ladies are meeting at Two Rivers on Tuesday at 7pm to discuss the life and work of US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, the first Native American to be chosen Poet Laureate.

Free

Ayden Foster Poetry Reading

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

Details TBA.

Free

LEMON WORLD 11

Lone Fir Cemetery Southeast 26th Avenue and Southeast Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

This Wednesday! Let’s gather for the last Lemon World of the season 🍋 Everyone who has read before is invited to read again! Bring food and drinks! We will start a little earlier. Id love to see all you magical people there, let’s celebrate! 🦠🕯🍂🥂🖤 A weekly poetry reading series that takes place in Lone Fir Cemetery. *Reading site is visible from the cemetery entrance on the Morrison side across from the Belmont Apartments*

Free

Release of Alyson Provax’s “What are we waiting for”

Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) 511 Northwest Broadway St, Portland, OR, United States

Celebrate the release of Alyson Provax’s “What are we waiting for”, a limited edition art book composed of digital reproductions of letterpress prints. 4.25 x 6.5 inches, softcover, with letterpress printed jacket. • In the artist’s words: “In it I work through themes of uncertainty, the unknown, legibility, and what makes something complete. I drew on my own love of books and reading, and have explored the format of the book by responding to the reader’s hand.” • Event at PNCA’s new Book Arts Room, 511 SW Broadway, Portland. 6-8pm with reading by Jennifer Rabin @jenniferrabin at 6:45. This event is wheelchair accessible.

Free

Visiting Writers Series: Hanif Abdurraqib

Reed College - Eliot Hall Chapel 3203 SE Woodstock, Portland, OR, United States

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of a New York Times best-selling biography on A Tribe Called Quest called Go Ahead in the Rain (University of Texas Press, February 2019), The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ, and Publisher's Weekly, among others. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. Abdurraqib has two forthcoming books including a new…

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Free

Monthly Poetry – Andrea Hollander, Paulann Petersen, Chrys Tobey

Another Read Through 3932 N Mississippi Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for our monthly last-Thursday poetry reading! This month we have work from Andrea Hollander, Paulann Petersen, and Chrys Tobey. Blue Mistaken for Sky, Hollander’s fifth full-length poetry collection, reads like a memoir in verse. It explores a mature woman’s life after divorce. The poems are unselfconscious, and they detail with grace the pleasures and difficulties of aging and the evolution of personal relationships through a life. One Small Sun, by Paulann Petersen, takes readers from a fur shop in Oregon to a Hyderabadi shrine in India’s subcontinent. Its pages contain a meditation on post-mortem photographs, an ode to the female earwig, an elegy for a grandmother’s panache. Tapping deeply into memory, relying on poetry’s ability to bring alive again what is coded into…

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Free

Nick Flynn

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Beginning with a poem called “Confessional” and ending with a poem titled “Saint Augustine,” Nick Flynn's I Will Destroy You (Graywolf) interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform. But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. Begin by descending, Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing.

Free
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