7/19: Book signing with Katie Manning and Sally Rosen Kindred, 3pm
In The Parlor at Open Books
About the Books:
The title of Katie Manning’s Hereverent offers readers a first glimpse into the fierce but gentle heart that propels life through this collection. An author-created neologism, this portmanteau of “heretical” and “reverent” describes these poems born out of Manning’s frustration with watching people take language from the Bible and weaponize it against other people. At times barbed and challenging, and at other times playful and joyous, this work is a portal into another universe for any reader who understands that love and kindness are truly sacred.
Where the Wolf is a wood where a girl-turned-woman, a daughter-turned-mother, goes walking, searching for the warm fur, the hackles and hurts—past and future—inside her. These poems explore how stories—fairy tales, family memories, myths, and dreams—tell us, and let us tell each other, who we are, and what’s wild and sacred in our connections. From “the beast your mother made/ who scans hood and bed,” to the ghost-guard summoned by a child on the night her family fractures, to the teenage son who transforms into “beauty, his dread-body,” the beings in these poems are themselves stories, spells: alchemized through language, always becoming, bearing hope and loss. They fragment in anxiety, and form into new wilderness. They open themselves to reconstruction, redemption. Through it all, “Wolf is the ghost of a hurt remembering itself. Is She. You can hear Her between trees.” These poems are a calling out—through meadows, emptied houses, dark skies—to wolf and self, parent and child, girl and woman, love and grief.
About the Authors:
Katie Manning is the founding editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of Tasty Other, which won the 2016 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and her recent chapbooks include How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press, 2022) and 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books, 2020). Her poems have appeared in American Journal of Nursing, The Lascaux Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, and Verse Daily, and her poem “What to Expect” was featured on the Poetry Unbound podcast from The On Being Project. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com.
Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of Where the Wolf, a winner of the Diode Editions Book Prize, forthcoming in 2021, Book of Asters (Mayapple Press, 2014) and No Eden (Mayapple Press, 2011). Her chapbooks are Says the Forest to the Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2018), and Darling Hands, Darling Tongue (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). She has received two Individual Artist Awards in Poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online. She teaches writing online for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.