Dion O'Reilly & Kami Westhoff: An Evening of Poetry

Sacral, Kami Westhoff's award-winning book of poetry, lives in the liminal space between parent and child, memory and mortality. Centering on the dynamic between the author and her mother, these poems navigate the heartbreaking complexity of caretaking when "no viable treatments exist for what ails her." Each page is filled with vulnerability and intimacy with a raw honesty that is as powerful as it is uncomfortable at times. Regret and grief, love and exhaustion, all appear as sacred offerings to the reader. This deeply moving book stands as a profound testament to loss and love, an experience "so holy even the fiercest fire can't ash it."

"When clarity falters, I follow you into the bog of what's best left forgotten," one poem begins, and Kami Westhoff takes us into the details of caring for a mother through memory loss at the end of life. Sacral is a poetry collection that made me take short breaks to sit with its sad beauty and cry. "A mother is a grave you're born into," another poem opens, and Westhoff captures the grotesque and the grief of caretaking in language that makes all of it—even the moments of shame-tinged confession—feel sacred. I know I won't soon forget these poems.- Katie Manning, editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review

"Dion O'Reilly's Limerence, though it chronicles the slow starvation of the stubbornly infatuated, is a feast. Its speaker is a bird who cannot stop herself from singing, in poem after poem, her gorgeous, glittering, aching song.... Limerence is a collection of love poems that chronicle, across a lifetime, the fallout of that early meeting, engaging with that most difficult of losses to parse: the loss of a love we maybe never really had."
- Francesca Bell, author of What Small Sound

Kami Westhoff is the author of the story collection The Criteria and four poetry chapbooks, including Sacral, winner of the 2023 Floating Bridge Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in journals including Booth, Carve, Hippocampus, Fugue, Passages North, Redivider, Waxwing, and West Branch. She teaches creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.

Dion O'Reilly is the author of three poetry collections: Limerence, a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition from Floating Bridge Press. Sadness of the Apex Predator, a finalist for the Steel Toe Book Prize and the Ex Ophidia Prize; Ghost Dogs, winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, The Independent Press Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Poetry Award and The Catamaran Prize. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Reader. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington. You can find her online at dionoreilly.com, on X @dionoreilly, on Instagram @deepobrain, and on Facebook as Dionn Lissner O'Reilly.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Village Books and Paper Dreams, 1200 11th Street, Bellingham, United States