Andrea Ballou's 'Other Times, Midnight' w/ Cate Marvin & Eben Thomas

Mechanics' Hall and Longfellow Books present a conversation between poets Andrea Ballou and Cate Marvin, to celebrate the release of Other Times, Midnight.

In Other Times, Midnight, her debut collection, Andrea Ballou explores the aftermath of loss – death, divorce, and departures – and asks the toughest questions: how do we contend with grief and remorse? Where does the spirit go to wait out trauma?

Ballou’s poems fight an “impulse to not speak,” aware that naming, and speech itself, are a matter of life and death. Their startling and often humorous images rooted in the fields, forests and domesticity of rural life are juxtaposed with oblique, at times irreverent, adaptations of Celtic and Greek myth and biblical stories.

For Ballou, language is both tool and weapon, as useful as a hoe, needle, and sword. Caught “in the mouth of midnight,” these poems wrestle with the numinous, their voices – cranky and cajoling, yet compassionate and vulnerable – urging us toward the fullness of being human.

“I’ve been following Andrea Ballou’s poetry for many years now and have been consistently amazed by the way she creates, as if from air, such vivid narratives, such rich and complex expressions of family drama, of love and loss and yearning. With wit, economy of language, emotional nuance, and fine intelligence, her work arrives fully formed and glorious. What a remarkable first book Other Times, Midnight is.”

— Kevin Prufer

Tuesday, April 22 at 6:00 PM, approximately 75 minutes, with a Q&A.

Doors open to the public at 5:30 PM.

This event is free for Mechanics' Hall Members, and $5 for general admission.

ABOUT THE POETS

’s debut collection, Other Times, Midnight, winner of the 2024 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize is forthcoming from Persea Books in April 2025. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Barrow Street, Black Rabbit Quarterly, Copper Nickel, FIELD, Lily Poetry Review, Plume, The Missouri Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in Romance Languages and Literatures and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize; she is the recipient of a National Resource Fellowship, a Tinker Foundation Grant, and an Artist’s Fellowship and a Project Grant from the Somerville Arts Council. Andrea has taught creative writing and literature at numerous universities and colleges and currently facilitates the Poetry Lab at the VNA Senior Living at Highland in Somerville. She divides her time between Somerville, Massachusetts and Brooks, Maine.

's first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. She co-edited with poet Michael Dumanis the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for which she received a Whiting Award, was published by Sarabande in 2007. Her third book of poems, Oracle, published by W.W. Norton & Co., was named by The New York Times as one of "The Best Poetry Books of 2015." Marvin teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine and is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in Scarborough, Maine. Event Horizon, her fourth collection, appeared from Copper Canyon Press in 2022.

This conversation will be introduced by Eben Lee Thomas , a short fiction and poetry writer based in Maine. His writing has appeared in The Word's Faire, GENDER DEFIANT, and the upcoming "Monster Beauties" anthology. He writes about animals, sometimes human ones.

PARKING & TRANSPORTATION

Mechanics’ Hall is located at 519 Congress Street. Our main entrance is between Loquat Shop and the Art Mart. The Greater Portland Metro’s Congress & Casco Street Stop is directly in front of our building, served by .

Parking is available at the , which has entrances on Casco and Brown Street, with a rate of $5 per hour. Metered street parking is available on Congress, Casco, Cumberland, Free Street, and other nearby streets. Free hourly street parking is available between Parris and Alder Street.

ACCESSIBILITY

To enter our building, patrons will need to navigate a single step or use a . There is a wheelchair-accessible elevator to the third-floor ballroom.

If you have a particular accessibility question or request please contact us at .

Host or Publisher Mechanics' Hall (Maine)