Book Launch, Tues Dec 8
7:00 PM Kellogg Hubbard Library
135 Main Street, Montpelier
223 3338

Tonight Not Even My Skin
poems by Leanne Ponder
Eastern Coyote Press 2015

During the seventies and into the early eighties, Leanne Ponder was a well-regarded poet, publishing regularly and widely, in small journals, and in big magazines ranging in tone from Esquire to Cricket.

She’d mostly stopped writing poems by the time she met Tim Jennings. For one thing, it wasn’t financially sustainable. Years of paying the bills by conducting poetry residencies in schools around Vermont helped burn her out. And for her, the life of a poet seemed unsustainable in another sense: her best work seemed to come when she felt strange and unhappy, then made herself explore that direction further.

She wrote fiction for awhile, listening to harp music as she typed, then she put down the typewriter and picked up the harp. She has not written since. And, she says, she’s been very happy.

But last winter she stumbled across a box of her poems, and read them, and found that she really liked them.

One of Leanne’s poems is called “A Page is No Place for a Poem,” which is debatable. But a box is certainly no place for those poems; they need to be in a book. And now, here they are.

Leanne and Tim hope you will join them at Leanne’s book launch party in Montpelier, at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library 7:00 Tuesday Dec 8. Geof Hewitt presides over the poetry part; Michael Arnowitt plays background piano during the coffee, snacks & schmoozing part. It should be a pretty good time.