Join us on Friday, December 8th, 6pm at Bunnell Street Arts Center for a poetry reading by Homer poet Wendy Erd featuring her new book, It’s a Crooked Road / But Not Far / To The House of Flowers. Donations welcome at the door.

Erd’s poems crisscross the Pacific: from an elegy for a forest in Alaska to a magical wish for those living on the streets of Saigon. Time lives differently in this work. Poems layer details of the human and natural world with the heart tugging awareness of the ephemeral nature of all things.  Within that tender beauty, these poems offer the possibility of transformation. An unfathomable radiance moves through us/ we are more of this world than we know, and less.

It’s a Crooked Road / But Not Far / To The House of Flowers was released on November 15th. Learn more: https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/crooked-road

ABOUT THE AUTHOR For twenty years, Wendy Erd traveled between Alaska and Asia supporting Indigenous and seldom heard communities to voice their stories through exhibit and film. Her writing appears as prose on road signs in Alaska’s Copper River watershed and as poems along Beluga Estuary Trail. She’s received several statewide literary awards and has been published in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Rivers Press, and in Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men and the Ocean They Fish. In collaboration with her dear friend Lê Phương, their poetry translations were published in The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present.

Praises:

“So many moments I had to look away toward the horizon and let a poem settle in my heart.” –Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar

“The profound inversions of the senses in Wendy Erd’s poems “drifting backwards, floating forwards” guide us with deft reverence to see more of this world than we knew we knew.” –Lady Borton, author of After Sorrow: An American Among the Vietnamese

“Beautiful, gorgeous book! Wendy Erd’s words have always had spirit-cleansing power. She abides in such intimate relation to everything, spruce trees of Alaska, porcupines, snow, a packet of morning-glory seeds, a Kunming grocery, a long loving relationship, inevitable aging – that her spare phrases and stanzas all feel like deep home.” These poems are exquisite compasses to live by.” –Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Everything Comes Next: Collected & New Poems