We're so pleased to host Appalachian poet Cathryn Hankla for a reading from her newest volume of poetry, Return to a Certain Region of Consciousness. This new book gathers recent poems with those culled from eleven previous volumes to reveal a mature poet and her journey through more than four decades of subjects, places, selves, and the challenging art of poetry.

From moon shots to pandemic ambiguities, like a color wheel of approaches to poetry's mystery and meaning, this book's prose poems, strict syllabics, metrics, and nonce forms of the poet's making pull into a coherent whole, unified not by consistency but by the poet’s perceptive imagination. A painter who began as a photographer and filmmaker, Hankla is at home in long poems or haiku, employing close observation, associative collaging, and spinning stories into talismans.

This event is free and open to everyone and anyone who loves poetry and/or Appalachia!