Next Year’s Words: A New Paltz Reading Forum

Next Year’s Words: a New Paltz Reading Forum and Elting Library
Celebrate National Poetry Month with featured readers Myra Shapiro, Cynthia Manick, and Timothy Liu on Wednesday, April 19, at 7:30 p.m. LIVE at the Elting Memorial Library’s Steinberg Room and via ZOOM.

For National Poetry Month, Next Year’s Words presents the noted and well-published poets Myra Shapiro, Cynthia Manick and Timothy Liu. See attached flyer for short bios of each poet.

Myra Shapiro plumbs life moments then works lines that cut may ways. Line endings let the reader hang, then fall into surprise and revelation. In “Gold Star Girl” she writes, My job is to live. . . ./ Not Job’s job, up to his ears/ in death. Tragedy// my mother knew when she lost/ her first child; then I knew/ she would die if I did––/ so I didn’t. My job is to live.

I try to quantify what we inherit—/ dancers legs that know how to roam/but be church pious by morning,. . . I want to give you a cinematic back-/story, far from southern charms and swamp/ boys, but I can’t picture your shift/ from girl to woman . . . In the poem “Is This Your Sky or Mine?” Cynthia Manick addresses her mother as one who feels the mother’s movements and decisions within her own body and mind.

How long will the bed that we made together/ hold us there?/ Your stubbled cheeks grazed my skin from evening to dawn, a cloud of scattered/ particles now, islands of shaving foam/ slowly spiraling down the drain, blood drops/ stippling the water pink as I kiss/ the back of your neck . . . . This is how Timothy Liu’s poem “Winter” begins, asking how long––how long anything precious and closely held can last as we watch the seasons move through their inexorable cycles.

As always, there will be an open mic.

Donations are welcome.

Live at 7:30 pm on April 19, 2023 at the Elting Memorial Library, 93 Main St., New Paltz, NY, and register on Zoom at https://cutt.ly/NYW-Apr-2023

Email: readandlisten@npnextyearswords.org or npnextyearswords@gmail.com
Facebook: NPNextYearsWords Twitter: @nextyearswords

Endorsed by Wallkill Valley Writers, the SUNY New Paltz Department of English and the online publication Lightwood: Life and the Arts in the 21st Century