Join us for an evening with H. G. Dierdorff, who will read from her debut poetry collection, Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter. A conversation with Erika Howsare will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter is a story about leaving religion and coming of age in a world of accelerating climate apocalypses and environmental loss. In her debut collection of poems, H. G. Dierdorff interweaves an investigation of wildfires in Eastern Washington with a personal account of growing up in Christian fundamentalism, calling our attention to the violent histories undergirding both.
“I want you to touch the fire / sparking from my lips” the opening sonnet commands, daring the reader to abandon the safety of analytical distance and draw near to the moment of ignition itself. The voice that emerges is incessant, ecstatic, explosive. Fire erupts from every page, multiplying into rage, desire, judgement, responsibility, and renewal.
A love song to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a dramatic portrait of a daughter struggling to find her place in her family, and a philosophical exploration of the limits of language and belief, this collection demands the necessity of both pleasure and grief as responses to a world on fire.
About the Author: H. G. Dierdorff is a poet from the scablands and pine savannas of eastern Washington, the ancestral, unceded land of the interior Salish people. She is the author of Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter, which was selected for the 2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry and published by the University of Nevada Press. Her work has been awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and appeared in journals such as Cut Bank, Arkansas International, and Willow Springs. You can currently find them in Oregon, where they volunteer with Write Around Portland and teach poetry through Literary Arts.
About the Moderator: Erika Howsare is the author of The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors, a nonfiction book that examines the relationship between humans and deer. She has also published two books of poetry and worked as a local journalist for more than twenty years. She lives in central Virginia, where she teaches writing privately and contributes reviews and essays to national outlets including The Atlantic, Orion, Los Angeles Review of Books, and others.
Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter will be released on December 3. To order the book, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"Like ‘concentric rings radiating from the heartwood’ of the forest, this stunning debut incises the page with deep and virtuosic music. Perched at the edge of our climate apocalypse, these poems find, between wildfires, a little room, a little grace, to sing of memory and desire."
—Kiki Petrosino
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