Sara Henning, Matt Mauch, Gretchen Marquette and Kyle Adamson read from their new poetry

Four poets turn elegy into splendor.

In A Sweeter Water, Sara Henning’s debut collection, lyric surface collides with both dreamscape and haunted reality in a metanarrative of longing. Within a re-invented diction of elegy, loss is its own gripping and hazardous splendor: dahlia as talisman for new awakening, plush anchor to reclamation, water as cleansing taboo. Reminders that beauty is only an abbreviation for what is most brutal and tender.

Sara Henning is the author of A Sweeter Water, as well as a chapbook, To Speak of Dahlias.  Her poetry, fiction, interviews and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Verse, Willow Springs, and the Crab Orchard Review. Currently a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota, she serves as Managing Editor for The South Dakota Review.

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“[Mauch’s] work is fundamentally devotional and embracing, driven, often breathlessly so, not so much to capture life as to make life, to create poems that have a pulse.” —Bob Hicok, author of Elegy Owed

Inspired by the 1950s’ LSD experiments at the VA Hosptial in Los Angeles, If You’re Lucky is a Theory of Mine is a “Pan Galactic Gargleblaster of a poetic cocktail shaken and stirred with a jigger of Billy Bragg, a splash of Sun Ra, a shot of Desnos mowing the lawn, and a windowpane of Blake hurtling across the cloverleafed overpass as if it were one of the rings of Saturn,” says Lee Ann Roripaugh.

Matt Mauch is the author of If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine and Prayer Book. He hosts the annual Great Twin Cities Poetry Read and edits Poetry City, USA, an annual collection of poetry and prose on poetry. Mauch teaches in the AFA program at Normandale Community College and lives in Minneapolis.

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Gretchen Marquette’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, Paper Darts, and other places. Her first book is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2015. She teaches English at various colleges and universities, and lives in South Minneapolis.

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Kyle Adamson is an MFA student at Bennington College and earned a BFA from Hamline University. He is the winner of the 2010 AWP Intro to Journals Award in poetry and a Pushcart nominee. His poems have appeared in the Artful Dodge, Revolver, Alaska Quarterly Review, Water~Stone Review, Midway Journal, Specter, and r.kv.r.y. Kyle served in the Marine Corps infantry and was deployed twice to Iraq. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.