Virtual Poetry at the Library with Christopher Jane Corkery & Cammy Thomas
Poets Balancing On the Edge Between Light and Dark: Christopher Jane Corkery and Cammy Thomas
Sunday, November 21, 3:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Zoom
Join us for the poetry of Christopher Jane Corkery and Cammy Thomas who will read and engage in a Q & A about their writing lives. [Please register here for the Zoom Link]
“Love took the words right out of my mouth.” So begins the first line of Corkery’s poignant and unforgettable new collection, Love Took the Words (Slant Books, 2020). The occasions for her poems are often domestic: the thrill of youthful romance, of marriage and family, of children inventing new worlds. Yet here also are a poet’s acts, psychological and spiritual, in a life which, like every reader’s life, contains plenty and its absence all at once. Corkery’s first book, Blessing, was chosen for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poetry. The winner of a Pushcart Prize, she has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the St. Botolph Club Foundation, and the MA Artists Foundation. During the 90s and 2000s she lived in Concord, raising a family with her husband —teacher, editor, and literary agent Tom Hart (1944-2012).
Thomas reads from her third collection, Tremors (Four Way Books, 2021), whose short, musical poems make stops in the terrains of childhood, difficult and somewhat violent; middle life, with parents breaking down and children moving away into their own lives; and later life when memory falters but passion does not. Poet Alan Shapiro calls these poems “a coherent, insightful, and very moving arc from the wrong beginnings of a childhood marked by privilege and abuse... to a complex, mature and at times visionary grasp of the intricacies and inextricabilities of beauty and loss, desire and separation, without either side of the equation diminishing the power (for good or ill) of the other." Thomas’ first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has taught literature and creative writing for many years, including at Concord Academy.
Poetry at the Library Series is sponsored by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library.
