Erin Rodoni and Gillian Wegener

Gillian Wegener and local poet Erin Rodoni read from their new poetry collections.

About Erin Rodoni's collection, Body, in Good Light:

The first section of Body, in Good Light opens with the words, "Between any two points, there is a love story": points on a compass, points in time, between lovers and strangers, mother and child. Throughout this debut collection, Erin Rodoni distills experience for its essence, rendered in language that is fierce, tender, penetrating in its precision, and astonishing in its turns of phrase. Whether describing "turncoat cells" of cancer, the half–smile scar of a caesarian, or the alien landscape of childhood seared by wildfire, Rodoni's poems remind us how tenuous our lives are, how each moment arrives as inescapably painful and miraculous as birth.

About Gillian Wegener's This Sweet Haphazard:

The poems in This Sweet Haphazard are anything but haphazard in their designs and effects, and while sweetness resides here, it's a sweetness hard won by looking at life unflinchingly. "Green is a changeable color," Wegener tells us in the marvelous poem sequence "Neighborhood," an observation at the heart of all that's here, from nature to neighborhood to self and back again. Wegener's gift is to show us that the ever-changing, the temporal, is as close as we're apt to come to paradise.