Saturday, May 19: Missoula-based poet Lisa Kundrat joins us for a reading from her new chapbook, Speak, Cairn. 1pm.

Speak, Cairn, a poetry chapbook, takes the reader on a trip through a variety of natural landscapes (boreal forest by canoe, fruit-tree planting in an equatorial eco-city, soaking in mineral baths in Montana). The reader connects with people along the way who are rooted in the place the reader travels through. The reader continues to move, feeling moments of connection, but mostly alien and lost. The collection is book-ended by two poems concerning cairns, markers on a trail that show people where to go. As alone as we may feel as we travel through the world looking for home, when we add a stone to a cairn, we are connected to our fellow travelers. “We speak to each other through stones.” 

Lisa Kundrat‘s sense of adventure has led her many places, including Montana, Ecuador and Hudson Bay. Her poems and writing have won awards, been published in periodicals, and been made into songs and performed in an opera. She grew up in Saint Cloud, Minnesota and has a BA from the University of Montana-Missoula and a MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Missoula with her husband, Andy.