A Launch Event featuring Anna Laura Reeve

517 Union Avenue,Knoxville TN 37902

16 April, 2023

Description

Union Ave Books is proud to present a launch event for Anna Laura Reeve's new collection REACHING THE SHORE OF THE SEA OF FERTILITY. This event will take place on April 16, 2023 at 2 pm. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anna Laura Reeve is a poet born and raised in East Tennessee. Winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award, her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Terrain.org, Room, Still, and others. She has an MA in literature and creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. ABOUT THE BOOK: The poems in Anna Laura Reeve's debut collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility, are wide-ranging in subject postpartum depression, ecopoetics, creative manifestoes—yet all are rooted in the Southern Appalachia sprawl that she has made her home. Seeing motherhood as a primal rite of passage that need not be a single destination, the speaker of these poems taps into universal questions of identity and myth-making, allowing metaphors to work their magic as the rituals of caring for our land, our loved ones, and our bodies combine in startling ways. She transcends expectations by discovering a third way for the mother-artist that embraces her parenthood and her art as equally vital to a life well lived. As a result, Reeve's poems evoke a raw sensibility unafraid of the wildness inherent in the struggles of home, family, and an environment just as vulnerable—and resilient—to change as she discovers herself to be. "wild-eyed with the electric exhaustion of new motherhood" - Nancy Reddy "Anna Laura Reeve's work sets the standard for honest, visceral songs about postpartum life and living fully in the female body." - Marilyn Kallet "These poems have a raw and musical radiance....She has created such a luminous and resonant collection of poems that I can hardly believe it is her first book." - Jesse Graves