Poetry Reading with D. Walsh Gilbert, Pat Hale and Christine Beck

Join us at the Barney Library on Saturday, September 27 from 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM for a Poetry Reading with D. Walsh Gilbert, Pat Hale and Christine Beck.

Pat Hale, Dry Lightning (Kelsay Books, 2025)

In this rich, evocative portrait of the lives and loves of the denizens of Laramie, Wyoming in the mid 1970s and ’80s, Pat Hale once again shows us how plain language, without artifice, can be powerful and enlightening. Hale went to Laramie, a place “of relentless wind,” to work as a neophyte bee disease researcher (you won’t soon forget her poem “Stung”). For many there, it is a hardscrabble life. Many poems feature scenes of the bar life in Wyoming, none better than the dazzling pantoum “A Cold Night in Pinky’s Saloon.” “The world is not all sweetness,” one poem suggests, yet for those who love perfect control of tone, characters that leap to life off the page, and strong, resonating endings, Dry Lightning is sweet indeed. —Steve Straight, author of Affirmation

D. Walsh Gilbert,  no mother but the sky (2025)

In these marvelous poems of landscape and alchemy, the poet finds mystery within the ordinary and breathes it into language. Alive to the magic of the natural world, she conjures prisms of wisdom from mole hills, rainwater, “weedy tangle / and black mud.” The world outside her doorstep expands in the poet’s vision, as in the poem “Eventide,” when “The silhouettes of gloaming trees begin / to become ancestor, myth, pools of hidden ink.” In no mother but the sky, D. Walsh Gilbert reveals the enchantment one can find within our ordinary, extraordinary everyday world…if only we know how to look. —Ginny Lowe Connors, author of White Sail at Midnight

Christine Beck, Given Time: a mother-daughter cancer memoir (Finishing Line Press, 2025)

In Given Time, Christine Beck shows how grief remains a daily visitor—“my mother’s wallet, worn red leather. I’ve moved it from drawer / to drawer these forty years since she’s been dead, / as if one day she’d show up at my door / headed for the grocery.” And beyond the missing, the mourning, and the memories lies something darker: fear that the genetic roots that bind us, that “seek each other beneath the earth,” will reawaken after years of quiescence, creating more grief, more illness, more loss. “What goes when flesh goes?” Beck ponders after she’s diagnosed with the same cancer that killed her mother. —B. Fulton Jennes, author of FLOWN

An open mic will precede the featured readings for any audience member—one or two one-page poems please. Young/student poets are encouraged to read.