Sandisfield in Poetry

Photo above, Hannah Fries, by Susan Quinn.

Award-winning local poets Hannah Fries and Hilde Weisert read poems and lyrical essays inspired by “the landscape we live” — whether it be spring ephemerals, wandering cows, turkey families, birch trees, creeks running and creeks dry, mud, or mountainsides.

Hannah Fries is a poet, writer, and editor. She is the author of the poetry collection Little Terrarium as well as the book Being with Trees and a 2026 collection of lyric essays about the natural world. Of her poetry, Ellen Bass wrote “Hannah Fries’s poems are acutely alive to the physical world in all its varied, gorgeous, and vulnerable incarnations from rain to moon snail, moosewood to worm, fox to orchid. With rich imagery and fresh detail, Little Terrarium wakes us up to all the layers of “glimmer and decay.”

Hilde Weisert is a poet, teacher, and Sandisfield Arts Center co-president. Of her poetry collection The Scheme of Things, Ursula Le Guin wrote “Hilde Weisert’s quiet, versatile poetic voice, fully at ease in narrative and lyric, is distinguished by vivid accuracy of thought and speech, modest but absolute courage in choice of subject, a dry, sweet humor, and a generosity of spirit that brings me back to her book again and again.”