Happy Birthday, Book!

November 2nd marked the first birthday of my first book, Uncertain Acrobats. Abundant thanks to the village who helped bring this book into print and celebrated it with me over the past year.

I’m looking forward to commemorating this milestone with a reading for my press, CavanKerry, with my new press mate, Dianne Silvestri. The event is a book launch for Dianne’s beautiful new collection, I Still Have My Fingerprints, and it will be held online on Monday, November 14, at 7:00pm ET. It’s free to attend, but registration is required.

In other book news, Uncertain Acrobats was named a finalist for the 2022 Massachusetts Book Award! It was given a “Must Read” distinction, and I’m honored to be amongst the group of amazing fellow writers and terrific books celebrated by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Special congratulations to Martín Espada, who won the Poetry Award for his book Floaters, and to Lesléa Newman and Cammy Thomas for earning Poetry Honors.

Uncertain Acrobats was reviewed twice since I last posted, by Erica Goss for Sticks & Stones and Carla Panciera for Sugar House Review. My chapbook Dressing the Wounds also had a new review recently, written by Genevieve Kaplan for periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics. Reviewers are amazing literary citizens, and I’m grateful to these writers for their attention to my book, and to the editors of the publications where the reviews appeared.

“Amidst the chaos of emotions that is loss, there is a desire throughout this collection to be grounded in the concrete. Hart Olander is a truly New England poet and her images attest to this. Her poems reference Gloucester’s Good Harbor beach, cranberry bogs, yellow farmhouses, Fenway franks, and Heartbreak Hill. She recalls her father ‘wading in gaiters / through the snow’ behind his house. Her poems are full of stone walls, cellar holes, yellow warblers, jelly tooth mushrooms, hawks and crabapples. These missives from the world around her, so present and alive, form a vivid contrast to what she is missing, this person both very real and mythical.”

– Carla Panciera, Sugar House Review

In writing news beyond the book, I was honored to have my poem for Rachel Carson, written as an ekphrastic response to a woodcut by artist Julie Lapping Rivera, featured with Julie’s works in a juried group exhibition, “Another World is Possible,” at A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton, MA this fall. Here’s a link to Julie’s project “Look Again,” which I have enjoyed being a part of through writing about Carson, Sylvia Plath, and “Tiger Lady” Mabel Stark. Stay tuned for news about the project’s future exhibitions elsewhere!

You’ll also find me at A.P.E. Gallery for my next in-person reading on Wednesday, December 14 at 7:00pm. I’ll be reading with poet Doug Anderson for the launch of his latest book, Undress, She Said.

Hope to see you at an upcoming reading, and hope you enjoy the extra day-lit hour today.