Kirsten Dierking will be reading along with poets Tracy Youngblom and Janet Jerve at SubText: A Bookstore. Learn more here

Tracy Youngblom’s full-length poetry collection, Growing Big, traces two journeys, a literal one from marriage and children to divorce and children, and a more personal or thematic one that explores spirituality and individuality in the context of human relationships. Youngblom explores the kinds of losses and triumphs that accompany family life and life of faith.
Growing Big begins on a note of reality and weaves its way through a loose narrative of divorce and subsequent recovery of the self to end on a note of hope.

Kirsten Dierking:
In Tether, her third book of poems, Kirsten Dierking explores the way our everyday desires shape themselves into the miraculous, like “antlers branched in sprays of bone against the sky.” In selecting
Dierking’s work for a McKnight Artist Fellowship, three-time National Book Award finalist Marilyn Nelson wrote, “I found these slight, reticent poems tender and thoughtful. They demonstrate the virtue of withholding, showing that sometimes less is definitely more.” Kirsten Dierking currently teaches at Anoka-Ramsey Community College.

Janet Jerve:

The poems in Excavation reveal deeply buried memories of childhood trauma. After her father’s death, the poet’s life begins to unravel and soon she uncovers secrets about her father that were once too painful for her to remember, but too burdensome to fully forget. An excavation to seek the truth, these poems follow the poet’s narrative to retrieve her buried self and rise up to live a full life unburdened by the past. Excavation exposes the pain of the human condition, but also offers hope and healing through embracing what is good in the world, giving and accepting love, and finding a way to forgive.