Sunday, October 17, 2 PM: Book Release Celebration for Maxine Scates, featuring her newest book, “My Wilderness: Poems” (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press).

The poems of My Wilderness take place on the wooded hillside in Oregon where Maxine Scates has lived since the mid-1970s. They chronicle how the woods, which were once a refuge, have turned into a landscape of change where trees once numerous are now threatened by storm and the presence of the humans who live among them. These poems also engage her partner's threatening illness, the death of her closest friend, and the death, at age one hundred, of her mother… Grounded in the shifting borders of migrations and extinctions plant, animal, and human, of memory and grief, My Wilderness inevitably asks us to consider not only our own mortality but also our impact on the world around us.

Maxine Scates is the author of three previous collections of poetry, Undone, Black Loam, and Toluca Street. She is coeditor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. Her poems have appeared widely in such journals as the American Poetry Review, Agni, the New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Her poetry is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

Joining Maxine will be Frank Rossini, who will be reading from his latest book “Last Confession” (Sightforsight Books, 2021). He lives with his wife, Lynn Nakamura, & their dog, Camas, on a small piece of land on the edge of Eugene, where he writes, listens to jazz, & tends a wild garden.

Our intention, Folks, is to hold the poetry reading outside, in our 26th Avenue parking lot, weather permitting. If it rains, the event will be held in the Bookstore.

(The most recent Oregon mask mandates will be in effect for all events, indoors and out)

Maxine’s Book can be ordered from Tsunami through the following link:

http://www.tsunamibooks.org/shop/my-wilderness-by-maxine-scates