Booker’s Point: Book Launch

Join poet Megan Grumbling on April 6 for a reading and an immersive video installation to launch her poetry collection Booker’s Point, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

Bernard A. Booker, old Maine codger and unofficial mayor of Ell Pond, knew the right ways to dig an eight-foot hole, build a maple sugar house out of a water heater, and snatch good white granite from other people’s back lots. This wry Yankee woodsman is the subject of Booker’s Point, an oral history-inspired portrait-in-verse. Weaving storytelling, natural history, and the poetry of place, this collection evokes meditations on home, work, nature, and elders – and, above all, the pleasures of a good story.

Co-sponsored by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and the Portland Poet Laureate Project, the Booker’s Point launch will include an introduction by Portland Poet Laureate Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, a reading by Megan, and a book-signing, as well as an immersive video installation, by Amy Grumbling, of the book’s settings in and around Ell Pond, Maine.

Megan’s poetry has been awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Robert Frost Foundation Award, a St. Boltoph Emerging Artist Award, and Scotland’s Hawthornden Fellowship; her poems have appeared in Poetry, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, Memorious, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and elsewhere. She is co-creator with composer Denis Nye of the new spoken opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, a Hinge/Works production that will premiere at SPACE this May. She writes for the Portland Phoenix and Dispatch, is reviews editor for The Café Review, serves as a mentor at The Telling Room, and teaches at Southern Maine Community College and the University of New England.