Join us in celebrating the launches of new books by two talented local writers!!

"I feel like the crud / I accidentally touch sometimes, whatever it is / that collects under cushions on my couch," writes Kayla Czaga in her third collection, Midway, an exploration of grief in all its manifestations. In her search for meaning in the aftermath of her parents' deaths, Czaga visits the underworld (at least twice), Vietnamese restaurants, the beach, London's Tate Modern, Las Vegas casinos, and a fish textbook. Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, these poems take the reader through bright scenery like carnival rides with fast climbs and sudden drops. The meanings and messages Czaga uncovers on her travels are complicated: hopeful, bleak-both comforting and not. Along with the parents the poet mourns, this collection showcases a varied cast. A suburban father-in-law copes with a troubling diagnosis. Marge Simpson quits The Simpsons. Death is a metalhead who dates girls too young for him. Midway is a welcome and necessary collection from one of the most celebrated and accomplished poets of her generation.

Anne Fleming's latest novel, Curiosities opens with a present-day amateur historian, Anne, who describes her unexpected discovery of five seventeenth-century manuscripts that, astonishingly, tell the same strange story from vastly different points of view. And so it falls upon Anne, the contemporary historian, to piece together these interlocking stories, discover the fate of a pair of lovers, and add her own layer of “truth” to a history and time period when there were no labels for who these lovers might truly be.

Please join us in celebrating these two new books! Kayla and Anne will read from their new books, followed by a Q&A with the audience. Lute-playing may also be involved!!