Poetry Reading Tonight - Valley Library

Jennifer Richter reads tonight in OSU's Valley Library at 7:30pm. Here's the title poem from Richter's prize-winning recent collection.


Threshold:

where mothers prop themselves, welcoming, waving, mostly waiting.  You
are a frame your child passes through, the safest place to stand when then
shaking starts.  You brace yourself.  He draws you like this, arms straight
out, too stick-thin but the hands are perfect, splayed like suns, long
fingers, the hands he draws for your are huge. Thresh, hold: separate the
seeds, gather them back. In his pictures you all come close to holding
hands, though the fingers of your family never touch; you're in the middle
of all this reaching.


Jennifer Richter’s book Threshold was chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.  Richter’s work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, CALYX, Cloudbank, and in the anthology A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry.  She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.