About this Event
Join local poet Laura Tanenbaum to celebrate the launch of her debut collection, Dear Mother, a series of poems addressed to an absent mother that weave together reflections on the loss of a mother, becoming and being a mother, grief, and middle age with occasional jokes.
Laura will be joined by poets Carrie Conners and Arden Levine for a reading, conversation, Q&A, book signing, and reception. Light refreshments will be served.
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Advance praise for ˆDear Mother
"Laura Tanenbaum’s poems summon the strange, straining, sustaining simultaneity of midlife: grieving a mother while being a mother; teaching the alphabet to a new generation and writing letters to the dead; time traveling in memory and desire to the past and future. She pulls us deep into the magic logic of childhood jokes and the spiraling wonder of how 'the newest bodies, like the oldest, curl inward.' Her voice is evidence that language can make family feelings both endurable and enduring." —Briallen Hopper
"A tender, moving collection, Laura Tanenbaum’s Dear Mother emphasizes how we seek poetry 'because the words matter or nothing does.' These poems are to mother, to self and city, to the everyday and the forever, and most of all, to language and legacy. Tanenbaum, offers us 'a reminder that the dented/ version of life belongs to us' and that we hold that life in our A’s and O’s and in our necessary never-ending elegies." —Nicole Callihan, author of This Strange Garment (2023) and SLIP (2025)
About the author
Laura Tanenbaum is the author of the new poetry collection, Dear Mother, published by Main Street Rag. She is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, where she has taught composition, literature and creative writing for eighteen years. In addition to poems and short stories, she has published essays and book reviews for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Dissent, and elsewhere. Originally from the Chicago area, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two school-age children.
About Carrie Conners
Carrie Conners, originally from West Virginia, lives in Queens, NY and teaches at LaGuardia Community College-CUNY. Her first poetry collection, Luscious Struggle (BrickHouse Books, 2019), was a 2020 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. Species of Least Concern, her second collection, was published by Main Street Rag in 2022. Her poetry has appeared in Barrelhouse, Kestrel, Split Rock Review, RHINO, and Killing the Buddha, among others. She is also the author of the book, Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth- Century American Poetry (University Press of Mississippi, 2022).
About Arden Levine
Arden Levine's debut collection, Spoke is forthcoming from The Word Works; she is also the author of the chapbook Ladies’ Abecedary (Harbor Editions). A finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series and a member of the National Book Critics Circle, her writing appears in Barrow Street, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere, and has been featured by the Poetry Foundation, Poetry Society of America, and WNYC’s Radiolab. Arden lives in New York City and works in urban housing policy and community development.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Lofty Pigeon Books, Church Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA, United States
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