Freya Manfred, Connie Wanek, and Louis Jenkins read from their poetry

Three Midwestern poets gather for an evening of verse at Common Good Books.





“Freya Manfred always startles me by how close she gets to everything she sees.  That’s her tough luck, but it makes her a wonderful poet.”--Philip Roth  



“What I like in [Manfred’s] poems is that they are not floating around in the air or the intellect. The body takes them in. They are brave. The reader and the writer meet each other in the body.”--Robert Bly



Freya Manfred's seventh collection of poetry is The Blue Dress, a chapbook.  A longtime Midwesterner who has also lived on both coasts, her poetry has appeared in over 100 reviews and magazines and over 30 anthologies, and won many awards, including the Harvard/Radcliffe Grant.  



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Connie Wanek's third book of poems, On Speaking Terms, is amusing, tender, and surprising. Wanek's poems emerge from everyday objects--Scrabble, garlic, lipstick, hawkweed--and the landscapes, waterscapes, and severe winters of the upper Midwest. Lit by startling metaphors, Wanek's work has been justly compared to Wislawa Szymborska's for its wry wit and spare "Eastern European" sensibility.



Connie Wanek is the author of three books--On Speaking Terms (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), Hartley Field (Holy Cow! Press, 2002), and Bonfire (New Rivers Press, 1997). She has been chosen as a Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress by United States Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. She lives in the country outside Duluth, Minnesota, but often finds herself in a green tent somewhere in the Boundary Waters wilderness.



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"Louis Jenkins writes satire as elegant as Horace but with motors in it and telephones and the North Shore."--Garrison Keillor



Louis Jenkins’ poems have been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Among his books of poetry are The Winter Road, North of the Cities, Before You Know It, and Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems (winner of the Minnesota Book Award). He lives in Duluth.