Level Watch Book Release Party: Reading with Mary Ardery & Matt Del Busto

Name: Level Watch Book Release Party: Reading with Mary Ardery & Matt Del Busto
Start: 2025-09-25T18:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-09-25T21:30:00-04:00
Location: 2122 Scott St., Lafayette, IN, United States, Indiana 47904

Schedule

Thu Sep 25 2025 at 06:30 pm to 09:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

2122 Scott St., Lafayette, IN, United States, Indiana 47904 | Lafayette, IN

Come celebrate the launch of Level Watch, Mary Ardery's debut poetry collection. Join us to hear readings from Mary and local poet Matt Del Busto, followed by a conversation and an audience Q&A.

Based on her experience as a wilderness guide for women in a substance-abuse treatment program, Mary Ardery’s visceral debut is set deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. These narrative-lyric poems chronicle a labor both physically and emotionally intense: bearing witness to campfire confessions, facing uphill climbs and frigid rivers and wildfires, reckoning with relapses and overdoses. Here is a nuanced exploration of intoxication and recovery, the ways we share and manage pain, and how our personal histories can haunt us but also lead us down transformative paths. Firmly grounded in time and place, part record and part elegy, this is a book for those who have been affected by addiction and all who have ever sought solace or redemption in nature.

Mary Ardery is the author of Level Watch (June Road Press). Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review online, RHINO, and elsewhere. Her prose and photography appear in publications such as The Sun, DIAGRAM, The Indianapolis Review, and The Cincinnati Review online. She earned a BA from DePauw University and an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. The recipient of a Lifelong Arts Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission, she was born and raised in Bloomington and now lives in West Lafayette with her husband, son, and Boston Terrier named Bug.

Matt Del Busto is a poet from Indiana. He received his MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he was also a Zell Postgraduate Fellow in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Image, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He lives with his family in Lafayette and works at the Purdue OWL as a Professional Writing Specialist.