Book Event Featuring Author John Hoppenthaler

Please join us for an afternoon of live reading and conversation with John Hoppenthaler, whose dreamlike works focus on themes of beauty and ruin as they are woven into the natural world. Hoppenthaler’s latest book of poetry is named after and features the NCMA’s painting Night Wing: Metropolitan Area Composite II by Yvonne Jacquette.

Refreshments will be served. Signed books will be available for purchase at the event.

From the publisher
From observation to contemplation, into memory and back to the scorched and gorgeous present, Hoppenthaler’s fourth collection voices a hard-earned weariness that acknowledges but resists resignation. As Grammy Award–winning songwriter Rosanne Cash puts it, “Hoppenthaler’s attention to the specifics of nature—hummingbirds, Japanese maples, snowfall—are like embroidery, stitched through and holding together the sharp memories and images of loss, longing, regret, and hope.” These subtle yet powerful poems assay aging, spirituality, contemporary political concerns, death, the struggles of a mentally ill child and related marital pressures, and the poet’s odyssey ends with resiliency and purpose reinscribed.

About the author
John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry include Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, Lives of Water, and the forthcoming Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, all with Carnegie Mellon UP. With Kazim Ali he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company. His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Magazine, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Literary Review, Blackbird, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and textbooks. Professor of creative writing and literature at East Carolina University, he also serves on the advisory board for Backbone Press, specializing in the publication and promotion of marginalized voices. For nine years, he served as personal assistant to Toni Morrison. He was the poetry editor of Kestrel for 12 years and the editor of A Poetry Congeries for 10 years.

Book cover: Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University Press