Collected Works is proud to present poets Meredith Trede and Cynthia West for a reading of their latest pieces.  Meredith Trede’s first book, Field Theory, is thick with lives; when you open the book it’s as if you’ve walked into a crowded room. She makes portraits with great musicality and tenderness, sometimes in laughter, often in grief. Her poems distill experience; her wry sense of humor keeps simplification at bay. She invites readers into her story, not through a linear and detailed retelling, but with glimpses that encourage them to recall or imagine their own parallel stories, and to draw their own conclusions. These are poems of ironic detachment and passionate engagement.  Meredith is a founder of Toadlily Press.  Toadlily poets have won Pushcart Prizes, an NEA Grant, and state and regional awards. The Best of Toadlily: New and Selected will be published later this year. Cynthia West presents her third collection of poetry, In the Center of the Field.  Joan Logghe, Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, says of her work "Cynthia West is so given to place that her poems seem effortless as the wild sunflowers.  She says 'I haven't done anything to deserve these leaves.'  But she has been present in the mix of inner and outer, so brings us an earned language of landscape."