Name: TIME REMAINING by James P. Lenfestey
Start: 2024-11-21T19:00:00-06:00
End: 2024-11-21T20:00:00-06:00
Location: Plymouth Congregational Church

Milkweed Editions, Literary Witness, and The Loft Literary Center present a book launch celebration for TIME REMAINING by James P. Lenfestey
About this Event

Join us a book launch celebration featuring poetry readings from Time Remaining: Body Odes, Praise Songs, Oddities, Amazements by the author James P. Lenfestey.

This event is free and open to the public and is part of Plymouth Congregational Church's Literary Witness Series and co-presented by Milkweed Editions and The Loft Literary Center. Books will be available for purchase at the event.

ABOUT THE BOOK

is 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, Lenfesty writes love songs to the world “as it really is: bizarro, curious, inelegant, unclean, / unfaithful, filled with delight.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James P. Lenfestey is the author of Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain, a Minnesota Book Award finalist, and 14 other collections of essays and poems plus three edited anthologies, including A Marriage Book: 50 Years of Poems from a Marriage, finalist for two Midwest Book Awards. Former chair of the Literary Witnesses poetry series, he serves on the boards of Red Dragonfly Press in Northfield and the Hellbender Poetry Gathering in Asheville, North Carolina.