Today in the ArtZany Radio studio Paula Granquist welcomes Northfield poets Becky Boling (Here Beyond Small Wonders) and Susan Jaret McKinstry (Tumblehome) to preview their upcoming event at Content Bookstore. Celebrate National Poetry Month with us and discover the joy, wonder, glory, and wisdom of poetry.
Poetry Night: Becky Boling and Susan Jaret McKinstry, Thursday May 15, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM at Content Bookstore in Northfield.
Content welcomes Northfield poets Becky Boling and Susan Jaret McKinstry for a delightful evening of poetry. Join us as Becky reads from her new collection, HERE BEYOND SMALL WONDERS, and Susan reads from her latest release, TUMBLEHOME.
Here Beyond Small Wonder by Becky Boling: These 37 poems find mystery and wonder in everyday objects and settings–from Adirondack snow-covered chairs to an autumnal beach on an inland sea to a city garden between high-rise walls. Boling invites us to witness, often with irony and humor, life’s many dramas. A puppy refuses to give up a dead mouse he’s tracked to the bushes, the poet takes a shower with a large black ant, an entire neighborhood parades daily just to get a glimpse of nesting owls. Boundaries are transgressed by ordinary events, unavoidable change, and natural cataclysmic forces, and yet these poems, never morose, pay homage to the permeable worlds we all inhabit. In Here Beyond Small Wonders, there is no such thing as an insignificant life or death.
A Pushcart nominee, Becky Boling, the Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. Professor of Spanish and the Liberal Arts, emerita, taught Latin American Literature and Language at Carleton College for 36 years. Her poetry appears in Agates, 3rd Wednesday, Gleam, Lost Lake Folk Opera, Misfit, Persimmon Tree, Willows Wept Review, as well as in recent anthologies: We Look West, Bridge and Division, Kakalak: Anthology of Poetry and Art, and Little by Little, the Bird Builds the Its Nest. A “naturalized” Minnesotan, she was Northfield’s co-Poet Laureate, along with her husband D. E. Green, 2023-2024. Recently, she won Pennsylvania Poetry Society’s First-Place Prize. As Sadie Montgomery, she writes and publishes novels.
Tumblehome by Susan Jaret McKinstry is structured like a musical fugue, moving in three sections from the west coast of Ireland to London, then to Galway, and back to a small town in Minnesota as it interweaves and deepens themes of home, time and loss. The poems contemplate vast human history and the small space of our lives in distinct voices and episodes, with closely-observed objects – coins, stones, birds, water – reappearing and echoing to create a harmonic poetic travelogue.
Susan Jaret McKinstry has published poems in Plain Songs I & II, Crosswinds, Willows Wept, Red Wing Poet Artist Collaboration, and The Journal of General Internal Medicine. A professor of 19th century British literature, theory, and creative writing at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, she yearns for the sea, and has been lucky to teach in Ireland, Scotland, Norway, London, Florence, and Moscow.
