Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by celebrated Montana poets Henrietta Goodman and Philip Schaefer on Thursday, March 28, at 7:00 pm. Goodman will read from her new poetry collection Antillia (The Backwaters Press, March 2024) and Schaefer will read selections of his published work. This event is free and open to the public.

Henrietta Goodman is an assistant professor of English at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana. She is the author of All That Held Us, Hungry Moon, and Take What You Want.

Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won contests published by The Puritan, Meridian, & Passages North. His work has been featured on Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in The Poetry Society of America. He runs a modern Mexican restaurant called The Camino in Missoula, MT.

About Antillia:
The title poem of this collection refers to the phantom island of Antillia, included on maps in the fifteenth century but later found not to exist. The ghosts that haunt this collection are phantom islands, moon lakes, lasers used to clean the caryatids at the Acropolis, earlier versions of the self, suicides, a madam from the Old West, petroleum, snapdragons, pets, ice apples, Casper, and a “resident ghost” who makes the domestic realm of “the cradle and the bed” uninhabitable. The ghosts are sons, fathers “asleep in front of the TV,” and a variety of exes—“lost boys” with names like The Texan and Mr. No More Cowboy Hat whom Henrietta Goodman treats with snarky wit but also with grief, guilt, and love.

Although memories pervade this collection, these poems also look forward and outward into a world where social inequality and environmental disaster meet the possibility of metamorphosis.

Henrietta Goodman

Philip Schaefer