Join us for our virtual poetry book club in collaboration with local zine Cicadian Rhythm.
For our September 2025 meeting, we will be joined by Olivia Claire Friedman (An Arm Fixed To A Wing) and Theodora Ziolkowski (Ghostlit) for a discussion about loss, mythology, nostalgia, feminism, spirituality, writing, inspiration, publishing, and more! The authors will share their poetry, as well as a prompt for attendees.
Join our Discord channel today to connect with the club, share poems, and partake in our virtual meetings!
Olivia Clare Friedman:
Olivia Clare Friedman's An Arm Fixed to a Wing seeks out the spiritual elements that haunt the everyday, the divine wing fastened to an earthly arm. Elegies and poems of nostalgia appear alongside pieces celebrating the speaker's present moment, with the underlying knowledge that such moments slip past too easily. Several poems explore the theme of motherhood--the excitement and novelty, the routine and translucent sleeplessness. At the book's center sits a sequence of narrative pieces, titled "Camera Poems," exploring experiences of isolation, hopefulness, and self-awareness.
While the poems in An Arm Fixed to a Wing acknowledge that loss is a constant, their tone is frequently wistful, evoking the desire to recover feelings of attentiveness and wonder toward one's surroundings, both the mundane and the extraordinary.
Theodora Ziolkowski:
Intimate, urgent, and relentlessly inventive, the poems in Ghostlit reflect upon mythology and feminist pop culture and contemporary ideology as they may become embedded in the psyches and even the bodies of their inheritors. Through visceral and sometimes gothic-inspired images, mythological allusions, and the assemblage of strands of narrative, the poems in this collection chart the ways in which manipulative emotional strategies on individual and cultural levels inflict lingering harm upon minds and bodies. Throughout, the poems peel back the layers of what it means for an abuse survivor to reclaim a sense of self--long after the damage has been done. "It turns out that the years I believed myself lucky/were partly responsible for my thinking/there was something deeply wrong with me" could be understood as a refrain for the speaker in Ghostlit or as a shorthand for a cautionary tale about how many survivors may be encouraged to deny the reality of abuse.
