Jennifer Bisbing, Amy Leach & Kate Fox

READING & BOOK SIGNING

Jennifer Bisbing, Amy Leach & Kate Fox

Join us in celebrating the release of three new books by three authors, Jennifer Bisbing, Amy Leach, and Kate Fox. The three women will be reading in rounds from their newly released works beginning at 6 pm at Wheatgrass Books on Thursday August 8th.

Jennifer Bisbing is an award-winning book editor and photographer originally from the Midwest. She writes book reviews for Montana Quarterly, and edits for several national and international publishers. Her latest book of poetry is The Price of the Repair. She lives in Livingston.

Bisbing’s The Price of the Repair, ( Finishing Line Press, 2024) is a collection of unexpected, sharp poems that reveal what it is like to be lost in the wilderness-searching for home, where preference comes up against some surprising conflicts, both inward and external. At 48, Bisbing starts backpacking solo in Montana-where nature humbles her. Wildness is different in Montana. Bisbing, who once faced lions in Zimbabwe, finds her first grizzly sighting even more daunting. The bearded men in the backcountry, with their rifles, make the gang members in Chicago seem less intimidating. As a murder mystery author and the daughter of a renowned forensic scientist, it isn’t by mistake that villains appear on her pages. She invites you to walk this treacherous path with her. Hit the pages like you’re stepping onto the trail. Unearth the secrets hidden between the lines and discover what Bisbing found in the wild and in a diner booth.

“In Bisbing’s rooted and riveting chapbook, we encounter a poetic voice that luminously inhabits the Western desolation without romanticizing it. There is a keen light in the eyes of this stoicism, at the heart of these petitions to wind and rock, which land so artfully ‘somewhere between the sky and riverbed.’”
–Chris Dombrowski, author of The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water. He is also the author of Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s Most Elusive Fish, and of three acclaimed collections of poems.

Amy Leach grew up in Texas and earned her MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in Orion, A Public Space, Granta, Tin House, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and numerous other publications. She is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of Things That Are, published by Milkweed Editions, and The Everybody Ensemble, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Leach lives in Montana.

A book of mischief and improvisation, Leach’s The Salt of the Universe, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) answers fundamentalism of all kinds with rage, music, and delight. It asks questions that are urgent, impossible, necessary, and irresistible: Where does freedom live? Why does it sometimes feel so good to be told what to do? What on heaven and earth is the Apicklypse?

These and other inquiries arise from Amy Leach’s experience: playing fiddle and piano (and sometimes the organ); her childhood in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and its many prohibitions (coffee, dancing) and emphasis on the apocalypse. After listening to thousands of sermons from a variety of pulpits, here Leach is offering one of her own. She borrows the words of an old hymn, and says: “This is my story, this is my song.” Accompanied by four-year-old mystics and six-year-old geologists, bears and butterflies and willow trees, she praises not obedience but freedom, not secondhand but firsthand thoughts, not homogeneity but heterogeneity. She champions Emily Dickinson and Jesus over interfering prophets, questions over answers, the soul over the institution, Miles Davis over miles of marching. 

The Salt of the Universe argues against argument, and against restrictions of all kinds and their limiting effect on our humanity. In this whirlwind of linguistic cartwheels, philosophical shenanigans, and praise songs to the cosmos, Leach reminds us: we must run toward mischief, music, love, the wonders of nature, and the wild joys of all that we don’t yet know. 

In his Collected Works, the surrealist poet Paul Eluard writes, “There is another world, but it is in this one.” The poems in Kate Fox’s, The Company Misery Loves, (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2024) set out to examine what it means to exist in those distinct but inseparable worlds—worlds that can cause both misery and joy for those who are time-bound, but can also grant infinite insight and wisdom. All the voices and stories gathered here intertwine and co-exist, revealing, as poet Irene Kinney writes, “…this unknown buried in the known.”

Kate Fox’s work has appeared in the Great River Review, New Ohio Review, Green Mountains Review, Kenyon Review, Valparaiso Review, Pleiades, and West Branch. She has also authored two poetry chapbooks: The Lazarus Method, chosen for the Wick Poetry Series and published by Kent State University Press, and Walking Off the Map, published by Seven Kitchens Press in Cincinnati. She was an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist’s Grant recipient, and her poem, “The Lost Baby Poem” earned second place in Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Award competition. She lives in Athens with poet and scholar Bob DeMott, and their two English setters, mild-mannered Katie, and ill-mannered Patch.