Tuesday, September 28, 7pm – Poetry

The Moonstone Poetry Series

Eleanor Wilner & Mary Lynn Ellis

Eleanor Wilner author of Visitor in Hell ($18.00 University of Chicago Press)

Eleanor Wilner has published six collections of poems, most recently The Girl with Bees in Her Hair; Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems; and Otherwise. Her work has appeared in over thirty anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1990 and The Norton Anthology of Poetry. About Wilner’s work, the poet Wilner has been the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Juniper Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes.

Former editor of The American Poetry Review, she is currently an Advisory Editor of Calyx. She has taught, most recently, at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and Smith College. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and lives in Philadelphia.

“Wilner . . . has a deep and heroic belief in the transformative power of language and myth. She paddles her surfboard outside the reef where most poets stop; she rides the big waves.” – Tony Hoagland

Mary Lynn Ellis co-author of  With a Poet’s Eye: Children Translate the World ($36.25 Heinemann)

In this book the authors show how young children come to love playing with language as they create poems and how poetry is part of the entire curriculum. “Through in-depth dialogue, this gifted duo exposes their classes to poetry through music, art, dreams, letters, and the natural world. They capture the essence of what poetry is, its power to transform through metaphor, and the joy of seeing anew through one’s own “Poet’s Eye”.”–Voices from the Middle. Mary Lynne Ellis has taught at Villanova University and Abington Friends School. A veteran elementary school teacher, Jane McVeigh-Shultz currently teaches at Abington Friends School in Pennsylvania

Tuesday, September 14, 7pm – Poetry

Moonstone Poetry Series Presents

Daniel Donaghy & Connie Garcia-Barrio

In his second collection of poems, Daniel Donaghy uses the power of poetry to connect the Kensington section of Philadelphia he knew as a boy––a place replete with crime, poverty, fractured families, and various other kinds of darkness––to upstate New York’s woods, rural Connecticut’s town greens and small churches, Vancouver’s back alleys, the killing ground of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Kiowa County, Colorado, and the shores of ancient Greece. In doing so, he examines the relationship between memory and identity and strives to give voice to those who might otherwise be forgotten by history. Start with the Trouble is the place of fist fights and first kisses, where we sit beside the dying and where we sing to those not yet born. It is where Michelangelo’s Pieta recreates itself on a Kensington sidewalk, where a mother watches helplessly as two older boys dangle her son from the roof of a building, where a prostitute writes poems between tricks before she disappears without a trace. It is where Bruce Springsteen goes back in time to woo Circe and the Sirens, where a father returns from the dead in the voice of Babe Ruth, where a mother’s spirit rises from the shadows of spruce trees, where Santa forsakes his reindeer and slides into town behind sled dogs. It is where simple gestures such as opening a car trunk or loading a wheelbarrow become portals into faraway, nightmarish worlds in which the young are forced to bear too much witness to the world. Start with the Trouble is a place where beauty exists amidst every kind of ugliness, and where that beauty is made even more precious because of the depths from which it rises.

“Start with the Trouble is a memory-haunted book. Returning to the mean streets of Philadelphia, to an ‘El-darkened neighborhood,’ Donaghy tells stories of fathers home from aching labor, of kids who quit school, get in fights or accidents, drift off, or disappear. In the end, this is a hymn to lives that don’t flower, shot through with loss and, finally, redemption.” Kim Addonizio, author of Ordinary Genius

“Donaghy takes us to a corner of the City of Hope where hope ‘such a simple word’ exists as a complex illusion amidst the city’s everyday cruelties. You won’t find this corner on any tourist map. Here, survival is the only monument. While many of these poems look back, it is not with nostalgia but with desperation to preserve those who have been lost. These poems exist because they have no choice. . . . Donaghy is the real deal. He’s not striking any poses or doing any fancy dances. These poems grab you by the collar and compel you to listen.” Jim Daniels, author of Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies

“Dan Donaghy could have been a stonecutter, but he chose to work something harder. Amazing, in these finely sculpted poems, how beautiful trouble and loss and pain can be, how excruciatingly pleasureable. We begin, and so often end, in trouble, a fact these poems do not deny. But, still, Donaghy tells us, trouble is not all we have.” Jake Adam York, author of A Murmuration of Starlings

“Poem after poem offers the consolation of a thoughtful human spirit who struggles with the blackness and is not broken. Never peripheral to human experience, Donaghy’s poems, centered in the heart, teach us to preserve.” Vivian Shipley, author of Hardboot: New and Old Poems

Connie Garcia-Barrio, a hometown girl, teaches at Community College of Philadelphia.  Her credits include the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Christian Science Monitor and Wild River Review,  Interact Theatre chose her short story, “The Sitting Tree,” for a reading by a professional actress.  She has just finished a novel based on Philadelphia’s black history.