dianne stepp

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland poets Dianne Stepp and Judith Montgomery for an in-store reading from their latest collections. About The Nest's Dark Eye: Some traditions believe a grieving woman-given her vulnerability, given the boundless expanse of her sorrow-stands at the spirit world's threshold. Grief gives her a kind of holiness, a sacred compassion and perception. Dianne Stepp's voice possesses such a power. Her poems are finely crafted, deeply musical lamentations for her son who committed suicide. Her poems are grateful paeans to the natural world's bounty and grace. A poet-mother trying to fathom her son's final, devastating actions, she's "craning to see, twisting / to search the shape / of his death." The Nest's Dark Eye offers us sorrow's keen insight, its fraught and luminous…