Advertisement
Join us for a poetry reading with James Lenfestey & Nickole Brown at City Lights on Wednesday, October 8th at 6:30pm. James will read from his new collection, "Time Remaining: Body Odes, Praise Songs, Oddities, Amazements".An exuberant collection celebrating the body and the soul of language, wringing delights and amazements out of the latter years of life.
In his seventh decade and seventh full length collection, poet James P. Lenfestey dazzles with a suite of odes to parts of the body—heart, belly, ankle, teeth, ears, and more—and astonishment at the powers of language: “the sound of ‘n,’” our ancient alphabet, “the terror of publishing.” Known for his exuberant Chinese-style lyrics, now inspired by Neruda’s cascading Elemental Odes, Lenfestey praises Hewlett and Packard, Bruce Springsteen, “the language of crow,” fruit flies, and cabbages while recalling the “forgiveness of the Catbird” and random acts of kindness, all with his superb ear for sound, rhythm, and leaping figurative language.
Rhythmic, jovial, and eminently approachable, this collection embraces the Cetacean mind and the fearless left hand. Here, Lenfestey writes love songs to the world “as it really is: bizarro, curious, inelegant, unclean, / unfaithful, filled with delight.”
After a career in academia, marketing communications and journalism on the editorial board of the StarTribune, where he won several Page One awards for excellence, since 2000 Lenfestey has published eight collections of poems, two collections of personal essays, edited three poetry anthologies and co-edited Robert Bly in This World, University of Minnesota Press. His haibun memoir, Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain (Milkweed Editions) was a finalist for the 2014 Minnesota Book Award. His sixth poetry collection, A Marriage Book: 50 Years of Poems from a Marriage (Milkweed Editions), was a finalist for two 2017 Midwest book awards. In 2020 he received the Kay Sexton Award for significant contributions and leadership in the Minnesota Literary Community. In November 2024 Milkweed Editions published his eighth poetry collection, Time Remaining: Body Odes, Praise Songs, Oddities, Amazements. For fifteen years he chaired the popular Literary Witnesses poetry program in Minneapolis and led a summer poetry series on Mackinac Island, Michigan. He currently serves on the boards of Red Dragonfly Press in Minnesota, the Hellbender Poetry Gathering in North Carolina, and is the founder of Poets, Writers and Musicians Against the War on the Earth. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife the journalist Susan Lenfestey. They have four children and ten grandchildren. www.coyotepoet.com
Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems about her grandmother called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015 and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. The audio book of that collection came out in 2017. She’s taught at a number of places, including the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at a three different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. Her work speaks in a Southern-trash-talking way about nature beautiful, damaged, dangerous, and in desperate need of saving. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with Jessica Jacobs, with whom she co-founded the SunJune Literary Collaborative. Currently, she’s the President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2026.
Advertisement
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779
