Brookline Poetry Series

The Brookline Poetry Series is proud to present Joan Houlihan for our final reading of the season. Ben Berman will open the afternoon, and our splendid open mike will close it.

Joan Houlihan is the author of four collections of poems. Her first book, Hand-Held Executions (2003, re-released in 2009 in an expanded version), was followed by The Mending Worm (2006), winner of the Green Rose Award from New Issues Press. A common pronoun gave rise to her third collection, The Us, a poetic sequence spoken in the collective voice of nomadic hunter-gatherers at the threshold of language, which was named a 2009 must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. The book ends with its protagonist, Ay, recovering from a life-threatening wound. In the sequel Ay (2014), the character “recovers his speech & mobility & is treated as a god.”

Ben Berman is the author of Strange Borderlands (Able Muse Press), which won the 2014 Peace Corps Writers Award for Best Poetry Book and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. He has received awards from the New England Poetry Club and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Somerville Arts Council.