We’re trying something new! Join us for Community Poetry Night with open mic followed by featured poet Donna Henderson presenting her new poetry collection Send Word.

How Poetry Open Mic works:

Sign ups for poetry open mic will go up at 6 pm. Each reader may share up to two poems or five minutes, and we will get to as many poets as we can! Please note this is an all ages event, and some adult content may be shared.

About Send Word:

To be born is to cleave in the double sense of the word (to split from and to cling to): it is that first splitting which generates the urge to return, to bind.

These poems explore varieties of cleaving and their tensions, as the speaker navigates these across a lifetime: tensions between our feral and civil selves, between compliance and transgression, between connection and individuation, between containment and surrender, and between what the worlds of waking and dreaming each ask and offer. Ultimately, these poems are about language itself as both a means and a way, as language imagines for itself a unity located precisely in the places between.

Author bio:

Donna Henderson is the author of three previous collections of poems, two of which (Transparent Woman and The Eddy Fence) were finalists for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry. Her poems, song lyrics, essays, reviews and artwork appear in journals, anthologies, exhibits and recordings. A practicing psychotherapist, Donna lives with her husband, Rich Sutliff, on the banks of the Deschutes River in north-central Oregon.