Donna Spruijt-Metz with Suzanne Eddison

Donna Spruijt-Metz visits the store from California to celebrate the release of her first full-length poetry collection General Release from the Beginning of the World. She’ll be joined by local poet Suzanne Edison, last seen at the store in the fall of 2022 to celebrate her own poetry collection Since the House is Burning. In General Release from the Beginning of the World, Donna Spruijt-Metz attempts to reconcile the death of the father, the lies of the mother, a hidden half-sister, and the love for a daughter-with the impossible desire to banish the past from the present. She examines shifting relationships with the holy, referred to in the book only as 'YOU.' She asks: "Do YOU hear/a whisper/in YOUR//constant night/-and then listen?" She breaks her own heart to touch yours. Donna Spruijt-Metz is a professor of Psychology and of Population and Public Health at the University of Southern California. Her first career was as a professional flutist. She followed her flute teacher to the Netherlands as a very young woman, and ended out staying for 22 years. She had always written poetry, and her only way into the Dutch culture was through their poets. That’s how she learned Dutch, and she still translates Dutch poetry. During her years in the Netherlands, she slowly seeped into academia – for fun, at first, but then it became her next way of life. She married, had a child, and then moved back to California with her family. Always restless, she attended rabbinical school for a year and a half but found she couldn’t combine it with a career in academia, a family, and the increasing space that writing poetry took in her life. Her poetry and translations have appeared in venues such as the Copper Nickel, RHINO, The Cortland Review, The Tahoma Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her chapbooks are Slippery Surfaces (Finishing Line Press) and And Haunt the World (with co-author Flower Conroy, Ghost City Press). Her first full-length collection, General Release from the Beginning of the World, chosen by Brenda Hillman, came out in January 2023 (Free Verse Editions). Suzanne Edison's newest collection is Since the House is Burning, published by MoonPath Press in April 2022. Erin Belieu, author of Come-Hither, Honeycomb, describes the collection: "Musically adept, formally precise, both clear eyed and unfailingly empathetic in its worldview, it's a beautiful book--one any thoughtful reader of poetry will be glad to know. Suzanne Edison is a poet, educator and former therapist. She is also the mother of a child living with a rare autoimmune disease. She lives her professional life at the intersection of art, healing and education. Since the House is Burning is Edison's fourth book of poetry.

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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/1583710-0

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