Literary Launch featuring Antonia Lake and Hilde Weisert

Join us for two literary launches—a new poetry book from Sandisfield poet Hilde Weisert and the new journal Stone Walls II, with arts, history and culture of the Hilltowns of Western Massachusetts, co-edited by Worthington’s poet Antonia Lake.

Weisert will read from her first poetry collection, The Scheme of Things. Lake and others will read prose and poetry selections from Stone Walls II, this first issue features an exclusive joint interview with Cummington’s two national Poets Laureate, William Jay Smith and Richard Wilbur, as they describe their experiences in these small towns of Western Massachusetts.

Weisert’s poems have appeared in the magazines Cincinnati Review, Cortland Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, CALYX, and Ms. She hosted last year’s Sandisfield Arts Center “Celebrating Animals” poetry reading, and her poem “The Pity of It” won second prize in the Berkshire Festibal of Women Writers 2014 contest.

Here’s What People Are Saying:

“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.”

– Ursula Le Guin

“Worldly, capacious, melancholy, as if old friends were on a walk together, Hilde Weisert’s poems recall and respond to events from Paris to Hungary to Brooklyn. A daughter greets a father in an airport; a woman watches an octopus open a jar; a pianist chooses to play Russian music in America’s cold-war McCarthy era. This poet’s intelligent, quizzical takes on human history (and folly) mix science with philosophy—and pulse to the beat of the American songbook, too. Don’t miss “The Editor,” a poem about writing itself, or “The Payment” with its intimate, yet angled view of daughters, or “Away,” where the poet lures her free-verse heart into a taut sonnet. Hilde Weisert’s sympathetic genius shines in The Scheme of Things.”
– Molly Peacock

“Hilde Weisert’s The Scheme of Things is a compelling and haunting book that explores the many layers of family, friendship, feminism, art ,and the impact of the past on the present. Weisert’s powerful voice is at times wise, wry, worldly, but always compassionate as she takes the reader on an odyssey that includes this country, Paris, and even Hungary, but also the past. Weisert is the consummate poet when it comes to language.I can’t think of another poet whose language is so exquisite, original ,and luminous.”
– Laura Boss