10/27/2026
This Friday, join us for a wonderful evening with authors Mark Caskie and Christopher Shipman!
In Field Notes for Extinction by Mark Caskie, the poems reflect on mortality: that of humans and of other forms of life; even nonliving objects, imbued as they are with our very human associations. It gives perspective-we're all just passing through, although that does not result in meaninglessness. In fact, the close attention given to the subjects of the poems honors them. Field Notes for Extinction is a collection of poems that manages to be humble and powerful at the same time.
In Mortar, Christopher Shipman confronts the legacy of his grandmother's murder and the weight it presses across generations. Moving by accretion-prose, lyric, and fragmented poems, each layering fact, dream, and invention-the collection returns to the brick with incantatory force, at once the weapon of the crime and the figure of its aftermath. "The night is long, I mean generations," Shipman writes, and the poems enact that long night's tension, always approaching the house of the murder, always on the verge of witnessing the violence itself, "like the scene in the movie that scatters birds." Alongside these hauntings, life persists: a father with his daughter, a husband pursuing simple dailiness. Restless, inventive, and tender, Mortar transforms trauma into lyric witness-a fearless book haunted by what it cannot release
This event is in partnership with the Ashe County Public Library.
