Calliope Poetry Reading at West Falmouth Library

Calliope, a Community for Poets, will stage its monthly
reading at West Falmouth Library, 575 West Falmouth Highway, from 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday,
February 9. Featured poets Ann Bookman, Mark Pawlak and Susan
Elizabeth Sweeney will read from
their new collections.  The open mic, for
which sign up is at 2:45, offers local poets the opportunity to read from a
poem-in-progress.  A reception with
refreshments will follow. Books will be available for purchase. A $5 suggested
donation will fund the poets’ stipend. 

Bookman is the
author of the chapbook, “Point of Attachment” (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her
poems have been published in “Larcom Review.” “Chronogram” and other
journals.  Her “carefully crafted
poems…offer a luminous lesson in how we live between love and loss,” says poet
Ellen Steinbaum.  From her poem, “Sight
Seeing Trip,” Bookman explores this theme, “When my mother died I went west
with the man/I loved but could not marry/…And then my mother came to me,/her
hair filled with leaves and pears,/ her eyes clear through layers/of wallpaper,
paste and plaster.// She spoke calmly from the other side/of the wall, of the
world, of loving/ and losing, and impossible loving/ and impossible losing,…” 

Bookman is an anthropologist and is the Director of the
Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at UMass Boston.  She has published widely on gender roles,
workplace discrimination, family caregiving and the role of grassroots
organizations in creating social change. 

Pawlak is the
author of seven poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies.  His latest book is “Go to the Pine: Quoddy
Journals 2005 – 2010 (Plein Air Editions/Bootstrap Press, 2012).  “From chaconne to aubade Mark Pawlak’s book
is a wordsong to the Maine coast into which ‘the sea twice daily/insinuates its
tongue.’” 

Pawlak’s work has been translated into German, Polish, and
Spanish, and has been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw.  His poems have appeared in the anthologies
“The Best American Poetry” and “Blood to Remember:  American Poets on the Holocaust,” among other
publications.  For more than 33 years,
Pawlak has been an editor of the Brooklyn-based Hanging Loose Press. He
supports his poetry habit by teaching mathematics at UMass Boston, where he is
Director of Academic Support Programs. 

Sweeney’s collection,
“Hand Me Down” (Finishing Line Press, 2013) was a semifinalist in the 2012
New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. 
Her poems have appeared in “The Worcester Review,” “The Journal of Irish
Literature,” and elsewhere.  Her awards
include the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize
and an American Academy of Poets Prize.  Of her collection, Robert Cording says,
“Sweeney achieves, as Yeats said poets should, that highly stitched poem that
never shows its stitches.” From the title poem, “The Hand-Me-Down,” “I once
stepped into it, as in a dream/before remembering that fairy tale/about a dress
which burns away one’s skin./If only it could somehow be sent back/since you,
like me, look much too pale in black.” 

Sweeney grew up in Baltimore, graduated from Mount Holyoke
College, and earned her MFA in poetry and PhD in English from Brown University.  She lives in Worcester and teaches American
literature and creative writing at the College of the Holy Cross.