Join us for an afternoon of poetry featuring local authors Cindy Savett, Liz Chang, and Paul Hutchinson, followed by an open mic session.

Cindy Savett is the author of Child in the Road (Parlor Press) and the chapbooks The Story of My Eyes, Battle for the Metal Kiss, Rachel: In the Temporary Mist of Prayer, and Overtures of Survival. Her latest work, The Breath (BlazeVOX), is a riveting meditation on grief and resilience, written in response to the death of her young daughter.

Liz Chang's new book of poems, Museum of Things (Finishing Line Press), is "a powerful and ingenious collection of personal artifacts -- and the associated memories -- in poetry form" per Kirkus Reviews. She was the 2012 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, and has previously published Animal Nocturne, What Ordinary Objects, and Provenance.

Paul Hutchinson juxtaposes words and art in his work. becoming white grass, his fourth book, is a collection of short, naturalistic poems combining a clean page layout and black-and-white images. His goal is to allow readers to reconnect with themselves and reconsider with a meditative freshness their long journey through this world.

Postponed due to COVID-19 precautions. New date coming soon.

In the Shadow of Others: Three Poets on What Helps Them Live & Work

What helps writers navigate life's turbulent waters and find our creativity? Ahmad Almallah, Olga Livshin, and Jenna Le - three poets from three different backgrounds - read from their works and comment on this question with insights about cooking, art, and mother culture/s.

Big Blue Marble is thrilled to welcome poets Eleanor Wilner and Susan Roney O'Brien in celebration of their newest books.

Eleanor Wilner will be reading from "Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems" (Princeton University Press, 2019); her previous seven books of poetry include Tourist in Hell (University of Chicago) and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon Press). She received the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America; other awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Juniper Prize, and three Pushcart prizes. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Susan Roney-O'Brien curates a monthly poetry venue in Worcester, Mass.; is part of 4 X 4, a group of visual artists and poets, and is the Summer Writing Series Coordinator for The Kunitz Boyhood Home. Her poetry books are Legacy of the Lost World (WordTech, 2016), Bone Circle (Aldrich Press, 2018); Thira, to be published by Kelsay Books in 2020. Her chapbooks are Farmwife, winner of the William and Kingman Page Poetry Book Award, and Earth (Cat Rock Press). Her poetry has been published widely, translated into Braille and Mandarin and nominated for seven Pushcart Prizes.

The first decades of the AIDs crisis tore through Gay communities, robbing all of us of musicians, actors, artists, and writers. Some voices - already then famous - we have culturally mourned. But there were so many others just rising into their art.

Poet Karl Tierney was just establishing his career when he died in 1995, and his work has remained unpublished as a book until this year. Tierney's literary executor, Philadelphian Jim Cory, has gathered Tierney's work so that we may all re-discover it.

At Big Blue Marble, Jim will be sharing Karl's poems and discussing his life and legacy. He'll be introduced by poet and LGBT literary critic Janet Mason. Following the reading there will be a Q&A.

“Reading Karl Tierney’s collection is like entering a portal into San Francisco in the ’80s and ’90s, a time when it was still dirty and sexy and alive, even as men across the city were dying. With sharp intimacy, Tierney’s poems had me laughing and crying in recognition for all that we lost. And I’m deeply grateful to the editor and publisher for rescuing his work from the dustbins of history. This is vital reading.” - ALYSIA ABBOTT, author of FAIRYLAND

Karl Tierney was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1956 and grew up in Connecticut and Louisiana. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Emory University in 1980 and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1983. That same year, he moved to San Francisco where he dedicated himself to poetry. He was twice a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a 1992 fellow at Yaddo. Though unpublished in book form during his lifetime, his poems appeared in many of the best literary magazines of the period, including Berkeley Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and Exquisite Corpse. He published more than 50 poems in magazines and anthologies before his death. In December of 1994 he became sick with AIDS and took his own life in October of 1995. He was 39 years old.

ABOUT THE EDITOR: Jim Cory’s most recent publications are Wipers Float In The Neck Of The Reservoir (The Moron Channel, 2018) and 25 Short Poems (Moonstone Press, 2016). He has edited poetry selections by contemporary American poets including James Broughton (Packing Up for Paradise, Black Sparrow Press, 1998) and Jonathan Williams (Jubilant Thicket, Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Poems have appeared recently in Apiary, unarmed journal, Bedfellows, Cape Cod Poetry Journal, Capsule, Fell Swoop, Painted Bride Quarterly, Skidrow Penthouse, Trinity Review, Have Your Chill (Australia), and Whirlwind. Recent essays have appeared in Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, New Haven Review, and Chelsea Station. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Pennsylvania Arts Council, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony. He lives in Philadelphia.

NEW LOCATION! For the summer Poetry Aloud & Alive will be meeting at Mt. Airy Nexus, 520 Carpenter Lane. This is across the street and a bit down the block from the store. The space is air conditioned and accessible.

NEW LOCATION! For the summer Poetry Aloud & Alive will be meeting at Mt. Airy Nexus, 520 Carpenter Lane. This is across the street and a bit down the block from the store. The space is air conditioned and accessible.

NEW LOCATION! For the summer Poetry Aloud & Alive will be meeting at Mt. Airy Nexus, 520 Carpenter Lane. This is across the street and a bit down the block from the store. The space is air conditioned and accessible.

Mt. Airy’s own Eli Goldblatt celebrates the release of his poetry collection “For Instance.” Alongside his poems, the book contains reproductions from woodcut prints by Wendy Osterweil and drawings by Michael Moore.

In a sentence, the phrase “for instance” follows an assertion or argument, and precedes a series of examples. Eli Goldblatt gives us myriad examples unconnected to a thesis, except insofar as the thesis asserts what is. This is a world composed of bombings, wars, bad history, framed in a private space of family, garden and dream-work (which often takes us back to all the bad histories). In a larger sense, the book is an elegy—for his dear friend Gil Ott, and for a world where fascists lose. But “even in Barcelona, Franco won.” “War grows” in the poet’s mind, erupting in museums and in his son, who “emerges into the sunlight stabbing, punching, blasting his enemies.” Words are like tattoos; they scar. The poet craves “a language beyond all this talk, / words erupting beneath words that evict / or seduce, dominate or sell.” Goldblatt’s book offers a public and private MRI; we do not yet have the results, so we can only hope for the best. Our best consolation may be that we have this map of one poet’s decency and care.

Big Blue Marble’s Readings for Writers Series brings together work and wisdom, with readings followed by talks on writers’ crafts. Poets J.C. Todd and Nancy Mitchell will be reading from their new books and then leading a discussion on World Building In Poetry.

World Building in Poetry

World Building isn’t just for fiction writers. Poets create worlds too.  In The Out-of-the-Body Shop, Nancy Mitchell has imagined a world of people displaced from their bodies. In The Damages of Morning, J. C. Todd has used research and oral history to preserve the personal worlds of Central European women whose lives were uprooted and dislocated by the World Wars. Join Nancy and JC in an exploration of world building as they read and discuss their poems.

"The compelling poems in J. C. Todd’s The Damages of Morning emerge from the “dark matter / of earth, terrestrial and sensate.” Set mostly in Eastern Europe and told largely from the perspective of women whom the World Wars trapped in history’s cul-de-sac, they drill down into the indelible details that bear witness to the struggle to survive—"crop-cabbage stumps,” a bullet’s “powder-burnt dimple / in a rammed-earth wall”—and hold both writer and reader accountable for damages that cannot/cannot not be undone."

Lee Sharkey, author, Walking Backwards

Whether homing in on the “blank, bright/as black lacquer” eye of a dead bird, the “scavenger-scattered/cryptic ghost script across the snow,” or the fireflies she mistakes for the father’s materialized threat “to burn//every single weed/into the goddam dirt,” Mitchell leaves no shade of grief or beauty unexamined. Rigorously crafted, these emotionally evocative poems probe what lies below veneers, beyond smoke screens, beneath the relentless pull of memories. They wrestle with the paradox of being at once “in the body, but not/of the body” and release their energy like the sacred “lit/sweet grass/braid” mourners pass hand-to-hand at a friend’s burial ceremony. The Out-of-Body Shop is transfixing and transformative.
—Mihaela Moscaluic, author of Immigrant Model

Big Blue Marble welcomes back poet and essayist Stephanie Burt. She'll be in conversation with Philly poet and translator Mai Schwartz, exploring what poetry is and how it shapes/is shaped by our world.

Stephanie’s newest book is Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems. is an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter.

Stephanie Burt is the author of three poetry collections, Belmont, Parallel Play, and Popular Music, and several collections of critical works. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works include Don’t Read Poetry; Advice from the Lights; The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review.

Big Blue Marble welcomes back poet and former staffer Kasey Jueds and two of her favorite poets, Hugo dos Santos and Leslie Shinn. Expect an evening of fearless, shimmering poetry that turns your world inside out!

Hugo dos Santos is a Luso-American writer, editor, and translator. He is the author of Then, there (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), a collection of Newark stories, and the translator of A Child in Ruins (Writ Large Press, 2016), the collected poems of José Luís Peixoto, which was a staff pick at the Paris Review Daily. Hugo has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Disquiet International Literary Program. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and won a Write Well Award, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Electric Literature, Hobart, Puerto del Sol, The Common, The Fanzine, and elsewhere. Hugo is a co-founder of the Brick City Collective and is associate editor at DMQ Review.

Kasey Jueds lives in Philadelphia. Her collection Keeper won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and was published by Pitt in fall, 2013. Her writing has appeared in many journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, Manhater tan Review, Salamander, Crab Orchard Review, Women’s Review of Books, and 5AM. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Soapstone, and the Ucross Foundation. She’s been a visiting poet at the University of Pennsylvania, LaSalle College, and the University of Northern Colorado.

Leslie Shinn received her MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. Her collection Inside Spiders was the winner of the 2013 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. She was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and lives in Philadelphia.

Big Blue Marble kicks off National Poetry Month with two great Philadelphia poets: Cynthia Arrieu-King and Emily August, in celebration of Cynthia's new book "Futureless Languages."

From Louisville, Kentucky, Cynthia Arrieu-King is an associate professor of creative writing and a former Kundiman fellow. Her full-length books of poetry include People are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus 2010), Manifest (Switchback Books 2013) winner of the Gatewood Prize selected by Harryette Mullen, and Futureless Languages (Radiator Press 2018). She edited the posthumous volume of poems by Hillary Gravendyk The Soluble Hour (Omnidawn 2017). Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Crazyhorse, and others. She has worked as a stagehand for Mister Rogers, as a nanny in an infant nursery, and on the line at a tomato sauce factory. cynthiaarrieuking.blogspot.com

Emily August is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Stockton University, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature, medical humanities, and creative writing. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in Missouri Review, Callaloo, Ninth Letter, Southern Humanities Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and other journals. Her current manuscript of poems, The Punishments Must Be a School, explores a centuries-long family legacy of domestic violence.

Join us for an informal evening of sharing together the Mary Oliver poems we've loved best. Bring your favorites to read aloud, or just come to listen. Drop in anytime during the evening!

Everyone's favorite neighborhood poetry gathering. Poetry Aloud & Alive. Featured reader is Nathalie Anderson.

Each month has a different featured reader always followed by an open mic.

Big Blue Marble welcomes poets Erin Hoover, Anne-Adele Wight, and Edward Scott Anderson for an evening of poetry that explores what it is to be human in an age of technological advances and climate disasters.

Erin Hoover was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, and in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Pleiades. She earned a Ph.D. from Florida State University and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she teaches writing. Erin has volunteered for The Southeast Review (editor in chief), VIDA: Women in Literary Arts (lead PR advisor), Writers Resist/Write Our Democracy (PR advisor), and Late Night Library (co-founder). Visit her website at www.erinhooverpoet.com

Of Hoover’s debut collection, Daisy Fried says: Erin Hoover’s supple, lucid voice, her storytelling skill, and the sheer linguistic and emotional intelligence of her poems make it hard to believe that Barnburner is a first book. There are poems here about bad jobs, environmental threat, about having or not having children, about sex, violence and many kinds of coercion, and maybe most of all about helplessness and control: who has control, how do we go out of control, how do we find our way back—if we do. A political, personal and timely book.”

Anne-Adele Wight is the author of The Age of Greenhouses, Opera House Arterial, and Sidestep Catapult, all from BlazeVOX. A fourth book, An Internet of Containment, is due from BlazeVOX this winter. Anne-Adele lives and writes in Philadelphia.

Of her newest collection, The Age of Greenhouses, Erin Boyer says: Welcome Anne-Adele––who seems to have no fear, not even the one of looking squarely at the planetary catastrophe of modernity––to the Lucretian halls of poets who spare no science. All this courage, plus I never thought I’d read an ecopoetics this funny.

Scott Edward Anderson is the author of Dwelling: an ecopoem (Shanti Arts, 2018), Fallow Field (Aldrich Press, 2013), and Walks in Nature’s Empire (The Countryman Press, 1995). He has been a Concordia Fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts and received the Nebraska Review Award. His work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Many Mountains Moving, Terrain, The Wayfarer, and the anthologies Dogs Singing (Salmon Poetry, 2011) and The Incredible Sestina Anthology(Write Bloody, 2013), among other publications. 

Anderson founded TheGreenSkeptic.com, which he wrote for ten years, worked for The Nature Conservancy from 1992-2007, and currently consults with conservation organizations and cleantech companies. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Samantha, and their blended family. Learn more about his work at ScottEdwardAnderson.com and connect with him on Twitter @greenskeptic.

Everyone's favorite neighborhood poetry gathering. Poetry Aloud & Alive. Featured reader will be announced soon.

Each month has a different featured reader always followed by an open mic.

Everyone's favorite neighborhood poetry gathering. Poetry Aloud & Alive. Featured reader is Hayden Saunier.

Each month has a different featured reader always followed by an open mic.

Everyone's favorite neighborhood poetry gathering. Poetry Aloud & Alive. Featured reader is Bob Murken.

Each month has a different featured reader always followed by an open mic.

Join us for a night of sparkling poetry that is Magical, Feminist, and (yes) Parasitic, featuring Grant Clauser, Daryl Sznyter, and Laurel Radzieski.

Grant Clauser is the author of four poetry books: Reckless Constellations (winner of the 2016 Cider Press Review Book Award), The Magician's Handbook (PS Books), Necessary Myths (Broadkill River Press, winner of the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize) and The Trouble with Rivers (Foothills Publishing). His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Seattle Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry and others. In 2010 he was the Montgomery County Poet Laureate, selected by Robert Bly. He also writes about electronics for the New York Times website Wirecutter, teaches in the Rosemont College Writers' Studio, reads poetry and craft essay submissions for Cleaver Magazine and chases trout with a stick. Grant’s blog is www.uniambic.com.

Grant Clauser’s newest collection of poems The Magician’s Handbook uses the surreal and the speculative to examine the beauty and hardship in the everyday. At once magical and mundane, these poems follow the Magician who starts as a neophyte and, like most of us hope, ends as a Magus.

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Daryl Sznyter is the author of Synonyms for (Other) Bodies (NYQ Books). Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, The Flexible Persona, Gravel, Phoebe, Poet Lore, WomenArts Quarterly, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from The New School. She currently resides in Northeastern Pennsylvania, where she works as a content writer and SEO Analyst. Her favorite topics are literature, psychology, feminism, art, anatomy, human sexuality, and anything she is unfamiliar with.To learn more about her visit www.darylsznyter.com/

With each poem in her debut collection, Synonyms for (OTHER) Bodies, Daryl Sznyter peels back one of the tender, horrific, humorous, and often magical veils through which we view ourselves, others, and the collective "We" that for better or worse, comprises the human race. The core she exposes may differ from person to person, but the unforgettable images—from a couple's tender moment at the gynecologist to a mother-daughter bonding experience at a concert—will fracture and restructure every reader's bones.

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Laurel Radzieski is the author of Red Mother (NYQ Books). She is a poetry editor for Clockhouse and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Golden Key, Really System, The Slag Review and other publications. Laurel earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and her poetry has been featured on the Farm/Art DTour in La Rue, Wisconsin. She has served as a teacher and has worn many hats in the theatre. Laurel lives with her husband in Northeastern Pennsylvania and can be found online at www.laurelradzieski.com.

Sometimes we all feel as if our relationships consume us. In Red Mother Laurel Radzieski weaves a love story told from the perspective of a parasite. This series of short poems explores the intimacy, desire and devotion we all experience by following the sometimes tender, often distressing relationship that emerges between a parasite and its host. Far from romanticizing either role, Red Mother takes readers on a tour of their own innards, exposing the hooks and claws of all involved.

In Poetry Is Not a Luxury we use the best contemporary poets to explore the most urgent social issues. Each month we focus on a different book and discuss poetry as poets do. We read our favorite poems out loud, listen for sound and rhythm, consider how the poet plays with language, and consider the joys and sorrows in the poems.

Our 2017-2018 season focuses on Voices of the Silenced/Voices of the Resistance.

The June selection for Poetry Is Not a Luxury is Ocean Vuong's "Night Sky with Exit Wounds" - a haunting and fearless debut, which walks a tightrope of historic and personal violences, creating an interrogation of the American body as a borderless space of both failure and triumph.

July 25 - Janine Joseph, "Driving Without a License"

Everyone's favorite neighborhood poetry gathering. Poetry Aloud & Alive. Featured reader will be announced soon.

Each month has a different featured reader always followed by an open mic.

Everyone's favorite neighborhood poetry gathering. Poetry Aloud & Alive. Featured reader is Kevin Grant

Each month has a different featured reader always followed by an open mic.

In Poetry Is Not a Luxury we use the best contemporary poets to explore the most urgent social issues. Each month we focus on a different book and discuss poetry as poets do. We read our favorite poems out loud, listen for sound and rhythm, consider how the poet plays with language, and consider the joys and sorrows in the poems.

Our 2017-2018 season focuses on Voices of the Silenced/Voices of the Resistance.

The May selection for Poetry Is Not a Luxury is Iraqi author Amal al-Jubouri's "Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation," translated by Rebecca Howell. Al-Jubouri contextualizes America's occupation of Iraq through the Qur'an's story of Hagar. The poems mirrors Hagar's desperate running between Safa and Marwah, as we pace frantically between pre- and post-occupation Iraq.


June 27 - Ocean Vuong, "Night Sky with Exit Wounds"
July 25 - Janine Joseph, "Driving Without a License"

Big Blue Marble is thrilled to welcome award-winning poet, critic, and translator Susan Stewart, who is also the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University.

Her new book, Cinder: New and Selected Poems, gathers poetry from across her thirty-five-year career, including many extraordinary new poems. From brief songs to longer meditative sequences, and always with formal innovation and exquisite precision, Stewart evokes the innocence of childhood, the endangered mysteries of the natural world, and deeply felt perceptions, both acute and shared. Reading across this retrospective collection is a singular experience of seeing the unfolding development of one of the most ingenious and moving lyric writers in contemporary poetry.

A poet, critic, and translator, Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English. She is a member of the Associated Faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology and serves as the editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. From 2009 to 2017, she was the Director of Princeton's Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. She teaches the history of poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetics.

Stewart's most recent books of criticism include The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making; Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, a collection of her writings on contemporary art; Crimes of Writing; On Longing; and Nonsense. Her most recent books of poetry are Cinder: New and Selected Poems (2017, Graywolf Press); Red Rover, Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle award, and The Forest. Her translations include Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, and she has published co-translations with her Princeton colleague Sara Teardo--Laudomia Bonanni's novel, The Reprisal-- and, with Patrizio Ceccagnoli, two books of poetry by Milo De Angelis--Theme of Farewell and After-Poems. She also has translated Euripides' Andromache with Wesley Smith and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini.

Monica Hand's second poetry collection, "Divida," comes out in April 2018, and all of us who love Monica and love great poetry will be gathering to celebrate. Reading will be a beautiful spread of Monica's friends and colleagues - check back soon for the official list.

Monica Hand's first collection, "Me and Nina," was published by Alice James Books in 2012. "Divida" was accepted, also by Alice James, in December 2016. To our community's stunned sorrow, Monica died just a few days after that happy news broke. So, in her honor, we'll be reading, gifting, promoting this book as hard as we can.

Cause two books is NOT enough, but two is what we have...

Everyone's favorite neighborhood poetry gathering. Poetry Aloud & Alive. Featured readers are Ona Gritz & Dan Simpson.

Each month has a different featured reader always followed by an open mic.