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Celebrate Poetry Month with John Macker, Jill Prendergast, & James Thomas Stevens
Celebrate Poetry Month with John Macker, Jill Prendergast, & James Thomas Stevens

Tue, Apr 04

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Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse

Celebrate Poetry Month with John Macker, Jill Prendergast, & James Thomas Stevens

Award-winning poet and playwright John Macker, CW's own in-house poet Jill Prendergast and IAIA Professor James Thomas Stevens will read from their respective collections which reverberate with a musicality that binds these poets and creatives.

Date, Time & Location

Apr 04, 2023, 6:00 PM MDT

Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 202 Galisteo St, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA

About the Event

This will be an in-store presentation and will be live streamed on Zoom, register here for Zoom.

All books will be signed by the authors and available to purchase by calling the store (505) 988-4226

John Macker:

Desert Threnody is unique in his oeuvre in that it collects, not his poetry, but his literary essays, a short play, and short stories. These assembled pieces represent about 8 years worth of work. The essays are for the most part, about poets with strong connections to the southwest, some unfairly infamous in their obscurity, a few not quite so obscure: his essays on Edward Dorn and Michael Ondaatje come to mind. In the others, Macker celebrates the much respected but unheralded poets that he’s come to know and admire. The author refers to them as "suspended essays" with no particular grounding except in his enthusiasm and admiration for the words and the ground itself. Maybe suspended just above the ground would be better. The second half of the book consists of a one-act play and several pieces of previously published short fiction, featuring a variety of characters whose passions and tensions are set against the raw, oftentimes uninhabitable beauty of the desert southwest. 

Atlas of Wolves:

"John Macker is not a poet to make you laugh, he is not a poet to perform his poetry in such a manner as to void its serious implications for John Macker is a poet grounded in decades of lineage arriving at his current destination. Atlas of Wolves consists of strands of words flowing across pages into the darkness of life brightened by the moon, measured by history and acute awareness by the poet of his surroundings. The poet creates landscapes with words in the section titled, Still life and Border Crossings. He pays homage to winter and the moon in the second section, In Praise of Winter’s Essentials and sings to us in the third section, Gorge Songs. These are poems of truth without need for explication, woven with imagery and metaphor. One can say that Macker has joined his beloved moon and ever expansive glory of the stars in the dark sky." -- g emil reutter

Jill Prendergast:

Mercurial

A collection of prose on a season dotted in change. I wrote this book to navigate being human when things felt so much out of my control.

Maybe Even Wonderful

This book is a small collection of essays and prosetry gathered and composted in a small timeline. May it ripple through the bigger stories.

Soap Opera

This is a year long collection of words, mostly formed at the laundromat in the early hours of each day.

James Thomas Stevens:

The Golden Book is a poetic re-vision of a 1923 grammar book found in a Santa Fe used bookstore. It employs the terminology and rules of grammar to explore personal relationships and roles.

About the Authors/Poets

Poet, playwright and essayist John Macker grew up in Colorado and has lived in northern New Mexico for over 25 years. He has published 14 full-length books and chapbooks of poetry, 2 audio recordings, an anthology of fiction and essays, and several broadsides over 35 years. His most recent are Belated Mornings, Atlas of Wolves, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, (a 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards finalist), Desert Threnody, essays and short fiction, (winner of the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards fiction anthology prize) and Chaco Sojourn, short stories, (illustrated by Leon Loughridge and published in limited edition by Dry Creek Art Press.) For several years, he was contributor to Albuquerque’s Malpais Review. His one-act play, “Coyote Acid” was produced by Teatro Paraguas in Santa Fe in early 2022. His full-length play, Sierra Oscura, will be produced by Teatro Paraguas in 2023. He lives in Santa Fe with his artist wife, Anne and two rescue mutts.

Jill Prendergast is a writer, bookseller and cafe manager based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has three poetry books, Soap Opera, Mercurial and Maybe Even Wonderful. Her work can also be found in Elephant JournalFolk RebellionSivana EastSnapdragon JournalLinden Ave. Lit JournalP.O.M.E., and The Santa Fe Literary Review. She is glad to meet you:) Learn more about Jill

James Thomas Stevens, Aronhió:ta’s, (Akwesasne Mohawk) attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and Brown University. Stevens is a 2000 Whiting Award recipient, has authored eight books of poetry including, Combing the Snakes from His Hair and A Bridge Dead in the Water. His most recent book is The Golden Book, SplitLevel Press, April, 2021. He is a Full Professor in the undergraduate Creative Writing Department at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Cañoncito, New Mexico.

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