April 12: Poets Michael Brosnan and Ralph Sneeden Read at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, NH

Visit Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, NH for a reading with local poets Michael Brosnan and Ralph Sneeden on Wednesday, April 12th at 7pm. It’s a great way to celebrate Poetry Month!

Both the natural world and our very human, social world are examined thoughtfully in the poems collected in Adrift. It’s hard to resist the very specific images that populate the work; they are sometimes delicate, other times bold, but always evocative. This is a book for anyone who feels, at times, adrift in a world whose uneven currents carry one into difficult seas.

Michael Brosnan is the author of Against the Current (Heineman), a work of nonfiction focused on urban school reform. He is a graduate of Boston College and the University of New Hampshire writing program. He served for more than two decades as the editor of an award-winning magazine on education and writes often on the topic.

“Whether he’s weighing stardust or the “musical hits of 1972,” Pez or the “truth behind the Ascension,” Yoda or Springsteen, Brosnan is a shrewd, seductive observer, flirting with “the searing knowledge of impermanence,” yes, but also deciphering a way to survive from the “hieroglyphics” of the natural world, “Some truth/about the art of living and perishing/in the flow of things.” I love the poems in this book, would gladly remain adrift in the subtle music of their multifaceted lineation, their authentic undulating meditations on “the stubborn art of hope.”  -Ralph Sneeden, author of Surface Fugue

Ralph Sneeden‘s poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, The Common, Ecotone, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Slate, Southwest Review, The Surfer’s Journal, and many other magazines. His book, Evidence of the Journey (Harmon Blunt 2007) was a finalist (in previous forms) for the Walt Whitman Award (Academy of American Poets) and The Yale Series of Younger Poets. Poems in it have been featured on Poetry Daily and received the Friends of Literature Prize from POETRY magazine. The title poem of Surface Fugue was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and the book, in earlier forms, was a semi-finalist for the National Poetry Series, and finalist for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize and the May Swenson Poetry Award. Sneeden has received fellowships from MacDowell, Columbia University Teachers College and the American School in London. He was born in Los Angeles but has lived for many years in New England, currently in New Hampshire where he teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.