At Gateway City Arts…
Author: rbwollman33
Gateway City Festival 4/2 @ 11:30 am
Friends in western Massachusetts! I’d love to see you. I’ll be reading from Changeable Gods for Slate Roof Press with Anna Warrock at the Gateway City Festival on Sunday 4/2 @ 11:30 am. The Divine Theater, 92 Race Street, Holyoke, MA.
Richard Wollman Reading at Rozzie Reads Poetry 3/16/23 @ 7 pm
Please join me for a reading from Changeable Gods at the Roslindale Branch Library. For those outside of Massachusetts, please contact hguran@aol.com for the Zoom link.
DMQ Virtual Salon Reading
A 7-minute selection from Changeable Gods in The DMQ Virtual Salon, a monthly video-based reading series featuring poets reading from their new books as a response to the shut-down of essential reading opportunities due to the pandemic. Thank you, Sally Ashton, for inviting me. https://www.dmqreview.com/salon
Recording of Martín Espada Reading
Thanks to all who joined us for last week’s exhilarating reading by National Book Award winner, Martín Espada, at Simmons University’s Robert M. Gay Memorial Lecture. It was quite an event. Here’s a link to see it if you couldn’t make it last week.
Boston Globe Review: Changeable Gods
NEW ENGLAND LITERARY NEWS
A book all about Cambridge, a Brookline Village bookstore closes, and a new poetry collection. By Nina MacLaughlin, Globe Correspondent, Updated April 28, 2022
Poetry that soars
Richard Wollman writes poems of the sky in his new collection, “Changeable Gods,” from Western Mass-based Slate Roof Press. Vast, varied, ever-shifting, creating its own world, our world: “The clouds are so far back, / the yellow ridges of the sky / so unreachable—” Wollman, a professor at Simmons, who lives in Amesbury, is deeply attuned to the colors, cloudscapes, streaks, and nightdomes. “Cerulean and nothing else, nothing / because the sea took everything.” But a force of presence in these lines is even more powerful than the sky: A woman named Sarah, to whom the book is dedicated, who died in 2007, thrums throughout. “Sarah was still alive. Gone a few weeks later. / No place before or since a home.” A depth of love and connection, and the gaping void of loss, is implicit, and perhaps, after such a love, and such a loss, perhaps it makes sense that Wollman’s attention is aimed at the sky—its endlessness the
only place vast enough to house the feeling of what’s gone.
This Thursday! Changeable Gods Book Launch
All are welcome! Please join me on Thursday, 4/21 @ 7 pm for the Book Launch of Changeable Gods, hosted by the Simmons University Department of Literature & Writing and Sidelines Magazine and sponsored by Slate Roof Press on Thursday. The book is dedicated to poet and dear friend Sarah Hannah, who we lost in 2007 and who appears in many of the poems. I’m thrilled that my students will be moderating the event. Alfred Nicol, author of Elegy for Everyone, will introduce the book, and there will be wine and hors d’oeurvres following the reading.
Where: Trustman Gallery, MCB (4th Floor), Simmons University
In-person and Zoom registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ADMjQLH_twEhR8Z5ilQ2G0e4hkbmtIvjZUFjc00VWVc/viewform?edit_requested=true
Changeable Gods Book Launch 4/21
Please join me for the Book Launch of Changeable Gods, hosted by the Department of Literature & Writing and Sidelines Magazine and sponsored by Slate Roof Press. I’m thrilled that my students will be moderating the event. Alfred Nicol, author of Elegy for Everyone, will introduce the book, and there will be wine and hors d’oeurvres following the reading.
Where: Trustman Gallery, MCB (4th Floor), Simmons University
When: Thursday, April 21 — 7:00-8:30 pm
In-person and Zoom registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ADMjQLH_twEhR8Z5ilQ2G0e4hkbmtIvjZUFjc00VWVc/viewform?edit_requested=true
Newburyport Literary Festival
The Poetry of Richard Wollman and Kirun Kapur
Saturday, April 30 at 10:15 am (online)
How much of the world is gathered in the work of these two poets from Amesbury, just across the river! In their cadences we hear echoes of the Psalms and the Ramayana. They bring us news from Steubenville, Basra, Surat; from Ashkelon and the defiled Jewish cemetery in Carpentras. But they also bring our attention to what’s happening in the sky above the Merrimac River and in the waiting room of the hospital, for theirs are intensely personal poems. Richard Wollman’s newly published work is a love poem which reads like a whispered prayer to “the twin gods of want and need.” Kirun Kapur’s new book makes expressive use of silence and dares to utter in compassion what emerges from silence, words left unsaid for generations.
Please join us for this online event! To register, please visit the Newburyport Literary Festival website: https://newburyportliteraryfestival.org/2022-schedule-of-events/
Martín Espada Reads at Simmons University!
On behalf of the Department of Literature and Writing, I will be introducing the extraordinary Martín Espada when he reads from Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry, at our annual Robert M. Gay Memorial Lecture.
Please join me for this special event. To register (either in-person or online):
Richard Wollman 