Reading with Maurice Manning

Wednesday, September 16 1:00 PM – 1:45 PM Ashe County Public Library This event is free and open to the public, no registration required. Join us for a reading with Maurice Manning with time for audience Q&A. MAURICE MANNING Maurice Manning’s forthcoming ninth book is American Poetry. His first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His fourth book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. Manning is the co-creator and host of The Grinnin’ Possum Podcast, focused on tall-tale poems, old-time music, geography, and local history. He is a professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Transylvania University and lives on a small farm in Kentucky. Most recently he has collaborated with musician, Brendan Taaffe, on The Bucolics Project that sets a number of his poems to traditional Appalachian tunes. Maurice Manning returns to the Kentucky countryside in his eighth collection, Snakedoctor. Existing between haunting memory and pastoral dreamscape, this quiet collection showcases Manning’s storytelling at its finest. Simple, four-beat lines hold epiphanies—“the barn is just an empty church”—and announce visits from a seven-foot stranger named Mr. True. Here, God is reimagined as a “serious banjo player” who calls the world to sing. And sing Manning does. Through rhyme, blues, and haiku, Snakedoctor trains our ears to hear music in the mundane, to find beauty all around us: in the annotated margins of a well-read book, the flight of a father’s shadow puppet, the yellow centers of daisies. Punctuated by rain’s pitter-patter on a tin washtub, and the ring of loneliness in a farmer’s voice as he calls his cattle home, Snakedoctor is a collection that will leave you wanting to dog-ear its pages. From childhood to fatherhood, church barn to apple orchard, moonshine to moonbeam, we leave these poems understanding Manning’s wish: “I wanted to make a prayer and I did, / in half sleep after the dream.”