Nina Lindsay & Rosa Lane - An Evening of Readings (Corte Madera)

Because is a book that reminds us why it matters that we are here, living our complicated lives, our days crowded with houses, buses, work, cafes, bakeries, fear and singing, brief joy and “rapturous dust.” These subtle and surprising poems are deeply engaged with the present, reminding us of how we are enmeshed with the particularities of existence: wisteria and neighbors, children breaking sticks, rats and trash, a skunk galloping over the lawn and an ant on the doorframe, and so many riddles we can never know the answer to in our “cake-like houses.” Musing and wondering, grieving and praising, these poems dwell in both the inner and outer worlds, in the mysteries of our daily actions and our dreaming selves.

Nina Lindsay’s first collection of poetry, Today’s Special Dish, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2007. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and has been awarded the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Lindsay also writes children’s literary criticism and reviews for Kirkus, The Horn Book Magazine, School Library Journal, and other publications. She lives in Oakland, California, where she works for the Oakland Public Library.

Tiller North takes us behind the walls of a fishing village in coastal Maine. With her insider’s voice, Rosa Lane breaks the code of silence in her telling: secrets embedded within class, sexual identity, familial relationships, death, and rebirth. “I once said I would not look back,” Lane tells us toward the end of the book, but how grateful we are that she has, opening a world for us where she learned to listen not just for the cry of the loon, but also the rhythms of boats in water, bamboo flutes, the “rusty jaw” of the mailbox, June bugs that “bomb / the porch light with spiny legs,” and all the sounds that accompany Maine’s harsh winters and lush summers. But we don’t just hear this world: Lane makes us see it, with one stunning image after another.

Rosa Lane is a native of coastal Maine, with familial and ancestral roots in lobster fishing. She earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of the poetry chapbook Roots and Reckonings (Granite Press, East, 1980). Her work has won several awards and appeared in numerous journals, including The Briar Cliff Review, Crab Orchard Review, New South, and Ploughshares. After earning her second master’s and a PhD in sustainable architecture from UC Berkeley, Lane works as an architect and divides her time between coastal Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her partner.

 

Location: 

51 Tamal Vista Blvd
Corte Madera, CA 94925