Join us at City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, April 6th at 3:00pm for a reading with poet John Hoppenthaler. He'll be reading from his newest book, Night Wing over Metropolitan Area, a collection of poems that balance past and present beauty and pain. It has been named a Top 50 poetry selection by Publisher's Weekly.
Hoppenthaler’s fourth collection gives voice to a hard-earned weariness that acknowledges but resists resignation. As Grammy Award-winning songwriter Rosanne Cash puts it, “Hoppenthaler’s attention to the specifics of nature—hummingbirds, Japanese maples, snowfall—are like embroidery, stitched through and holding together the sharp memories and images of loss, longing, regret, and hope.” These subtle yet powerful poems assay aging, spirituality, contemporary political concerns, death, the struggles of a mentally ill child, and related marital pressures. In the end, the poems conclude with a sense of resiliency and purpose reinscribed.
John Hoppenthaler is the author of four books of poetry, Night Wing over Metropolitan Area, Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir and Lives of Water, all with Carnegie Mellon University Press. With Kazim Ali, he has co-edited Jean Valentine: This World Company (Michigan UP). He is a professor of Creative Writing and Literature at East Carolina University. He also serves on the Advisory Board for Backbone Press, specializing in the publication and promotion of marginalized voices. For nine years he served as Personal Assistant to Toni Morrison. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney's, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Christian Science Monitor, Barrow Street, The Laurel Review, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, Subtropics, The Literary Review, Southeast Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and textbooks.