About this Event
Booksweet is thrilled to welcome poets Christy Prahl and Ellen Stone for an evening of poetry to celebrate the release of Christy's latest poetry collection, Catalog of Labors! Join us for readings from Christy and Ellen, author Q&A, book signings, and light refreshments!
About The Book \\
Catalog of Labors
Our professions are often where we invest the greatest portion of our time, energy, and ambition, sometimes at the expense of other priorities. Poetry is not expected to live in offices, banks, or bakeries, yet these are precisely the terrains Catalog of Labors invites us to enter. This economical and incisive collection by Christy Prahl seeks to establish a poetics of work grounded in attention rather than spectacle. Organized around concise titles such as The Plumber, The Docent, and The Vacuum Cleaner Dealer, the book unfolds as a gallery of portraits that unmask what is routinely suppressed in professional life: emotional disorder, private longing, quiet resistance, and moral fatigue. Across these poems, work persists through grief, aging bodies, and diminishing purpose. Sometimes we are the laborers; sometimes we are the ones shaped, managed, or depleted by systems larger than ourselves. Within that exchange, Prahl locates moments of unexpected majesty, elevating routine tasks into acts of endurance and care. Clocking in for these twenty poems offers a meaningful return. Readers are invited not only to observe but to collaborate, to recognize themselves, to be trusted with the keys, and to leave with language that honors the work they do and the lives they live beyond it.
Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them
Poetry gathers our lives, containing everything we hold inside. If poetry is a container, a place to gather what keeps us alive, what feeds our joy, and eases our sorrow, it is a communal basket, and it is often held by women. Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them is a collection of poems exploring what women hold, what they keep, and how they let go— of sorrow, loss and grief. Using the natural world as buffer, Ellen Stone writes poems exploring motherhood and mental illness, sexual assault, marriage and parenthood—as well as how loss filters down through family generations. The poems investigate daughters leaving home while trying to carry home within them. The moon is the mother in the book, waxing and waning, but always there, always coming back around.
About The Authors \\
An Illinois Arts Council grant recipient and multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Christy Prahl is the author of We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press), With Her Hair on Fire (Roadside Press), Catalog of Labors (Unsolicited Press), and The Grocery Pageant (Nixes Mate, forthcoming). Her poetry has appeared in a host of national and international journals, been featured on podcasts, and been scored by post-punk musicians. She has enjoyed residencies at both Ragdale and The Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow and split her time between Chicago and southwest Michigan. She is the founder of the PenRF reading series.
Ellen Stone advises a poetry club at Community High School, co-hosts a poetry series, Skazat! and is a co-founding editor of the craft journal, Public School Poetry in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her latest collection is Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them (Mayapple Press, 2025). Ellen’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, Third Coast, Dunes Review, Michigan Quarterly Review Mixtape, and Artemis. She was the inaugural recipient of a Good Hart Artist Writer Friends Residency with her colleague, Ashwini Bhasi. Ellen’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net. Reach her at ellenstone.org.
Event venue & nearby stays
Booksweet, 1729 Plymouth Road, Ann Arbor, United States
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