POETRY READING

Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts is pleased to support National Poetry Month by hosting a Poetry Reading. All are welcome to this free event to hear Arlene Distler, Alice B. Fogel and Rebecca Kaiser Gibson read and discuss their work.

Saturday, May 13, 5-7pm

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Arlene Distler co-founded the writers’ non-profit, Write Action, with her partner, Marty Jezer, in 2000. She has led the organization since Jezer’s passing, for the past seventeen years. Earlier this year her first full-length book of poems was published, This Earth, This Body, comprising over 30 years of poetry—including recent poems. “Again and again in this stirring collection, Arlene Distler limns the transitory, even illusory nature of human experience… ; yet with a winning stubbornness she treasures the experience and manages both to meet and transcend its challenges. (Her) defiance, often exuberant, makes This Earth, This Body an exemplum for human resilience.” (Sydney Lea, Poet Laureate of Vermont 2011-2015)

Alice B. Fogel served as the New Hampshire Poet Laureate from 2014 through 2019. Her latest of six poetry collections is Nothing But, a series of poems responding to Abstract Expressionist art and its effect on our consciousness. Published in a wide range of journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, previous books include A Doubtful House; Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature and the NH Literary Award in Poetry, Be That Empty, a national poetry bestseller, and Strange Terrain, on how to appreciate poetry even if you don’t “get” it. She works one-on-one with neurodiverse students at Landmark College in Putney, VT, and hikes mountains whenever possible.

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson writes, “I am especially intrigued by the dance of words on the page—the spaces, the leaps, the duets that can be accomplished by varieties of lineation, and the intentional spacing between lines and words. It seems a capacity that is available in poetry. I aim to mimic some of the ways the mind clusters and clarifies.” Her poetry collections are Girl as Birch, (2022), and OPINEL (2015). Her poems appear in Agni; Barrow Street; Green Mountains Review; Greensboro Review; Interim; Harvard Review; Massachusetts Review; Ocean State Review; Passengers; Salamander; Slate; and The Tupelo Quarterly; among others. After teaching poetry at Tufts University for 23 years, she founded The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville, a poetry reading series.