“Ordinary Entanglement”: A National Poetry Month Reading and Workshop with Mass Book Award-Honoree Melissa Dickey

Join the Palmer Public Library for a special National Poetry Month event with Melissa Dickey! Melissa will read from her acclaimed collection, Ordinary Entanglement, and lead a short, generative writing workshop.

In defiant and rapturous poems, Melissa Dickey captures unexpected moments of beauty and resilience, probing the power dynamics that underlie women’s private lives, as mothers, daughters, and lovers. Set against a backdrop of violence, racism, and environmental collapse, the poems of Ordinary Entanglement expertly braid inner and outer conflict into registers of jagged, perfect exchange, finding a syntax commensurate to the complex sayings of an inner voice. In seamy (sometimes steamy) poems that are not afraid to be spiky at moments, we receive a record of genuine thinking, of how one can’t help but think, in the knotted and gnarled realities of now.

This program is sponsored by the Mass Book Awards Speakers Bureau and is presented in collaboration with the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

MELISSA DICKEY is a poet, writer, and teacher. She is the author of the poetry collections Dragons and The Lily Will, and Ordinary Entanglement, which was selected as a Massachusetts Book Awards Poetry Honors title. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Bennington Review, New Orleans Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and the anthology The Anatomy of Silence, among other places. Born and raised in New Orleans, she currently lives in Western Massachusetts with her partner and their four children. She teaches literature and writing at an independent high school.