Saturday, May 20: UM alumna Natalie Peeterse joins us for a reading of poetry from her new chapbook, Dreadful : Luminosity, Letters. 1pm.

“Natalie Peeterse’s Dreadful : Luminosity is painful, precise, physical, powerful, timeless, full of the kinds of detail that make this love this love, this life this life, and so sharp that it is a deep & nourishing breath to exist here in these poems, in the smallness of ‘arms outstretched and while we do this with our hours it is easy to forget what was before we dove / down into that smallness’. But lest you think these poems to Peeterse’s young daughter are sheltered by a kitchen fort of love: no. The whole world dwells here, roaming, seeking, reaching for one another. So full of feeling, it is the work of the world and all of us who live in it to be here together. ‘Don’t look away, I tell us both. Not yet.’” —Ellen Welcker

Dreadful : Luminosity is a sequence of poems about what it means to live in this world with all of its shine and dread. The poet addresses her daughter, drawing a lyric map to the highways, chapels and alleyways where she might find the answers to the questions she will have as she grows into a woman.

Natalie Peeterse has an MFA from the University of Montana. She is the editor of Verde Te Quiero Verde: Poems after Federico Garcia Lorca. Her poetry has appeared in Magnolia, Blackbird, and Sonora Review among other journals. She was included in I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. Her chapbook Black Birds : Blue Horse, An Elegy won the Gold Line Press Poetry Prize in 2011. She has been a fellow with the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a participant at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and an artist in residence at the Caldera Institute. She is a recipient of the 2013 Artist Innovation Award by the Montana Arts Council.