Robin Walter & Becca Spiegel Live at Tattered Cover Colfax

Join us for an inspirational poetry and memoir event with Robin Walter and Becca Spiegel as we celebrate their new books on Thursday, May 8th at 6:00 PM at our Colfax location!

Registration includes the following options:

• A signed copy of Little Mercy … OR
• A signed copy of Without Her: A Chronicle of Grief and Love … OR

• A $5 Gift Card to Tattered Cover Book Store

We will have additional books for guests to purchase in store!

If you are unable to attend the event after purchasing a ticket, you are required to pick up your copy of the book (with proof of purchase from your event registration) within 7 days after the event date. If the book is not picked up by that date, you relinquish your copy to Tattered Cover Book Store.

ABOUT THE BOOKS

Little Mercy

Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Victoria Chang

In award-winning poet Robin Walter’s debut collection, Little Mercy, writing and looking—seeing feelingly—become a practice in radical care. These poems pursue moments of shared recognition, when looking up to see a deer across a stream, or when sunlight passes through wingtip onto palm, the self found in other, the river in vein of wrist.
Attuned to the transparent beauty in the natural world, Walter’s poems are often glancing observations unspooling down the page, their delicacies belying their powers of profound knowing. The formal logic of this work is the intricate architecture of a nest. Each line becomes a blade of grass, each dash a little twig, each parenthesis a small feather—all woven together deliberately, seemingly fragile but held fast with surprising strength. In their lyric variations, repetitions, and fragments, employed toward a deep attention to wren, river, and reflection, the human almost falls away entirely, a steady and steadying state of being that is unconscious, expansive.
Written out of a broken landscape in a broken time, Little Mercy is a book of gratitude, one that draws our inner selves to the present and living world, to the ways we can break and mend.

Without Her: A Chronicle of Grief and Love

“What is comfort but a filament between past and present with some sort of future implied? In other words, safety. In other words, care. I know it is possible to find these things without her—I know they are there. But it can be so hard to ask. So much is unknown.”

Rebecca Spiegel is working as a teacher in New Orleans when she learns of her sister’s suicide. Only after the funeral does shock give way to grief—and to many questions. How could Emily do this to herself? How could she have abandoned all those who loved her? And what could have been done differently to prevent this devastating loss?

In the days and weeks that follow, Spiegel embarks on a search for answers. She unpacks family history, documents the last traces of her sister’s life, and questions what more she could have done to prevent her death. What she finds instead is that there is no narrative on the other side of grief like this. There is no answer, no easy resolution—only those that leave and those that keep living. Unflinchingly honest, visceral, and raw, this courageous elegy lays bare the hard realities of surviving the loss of a loved one.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Robin Walter is a poet, book artist, and printmaker. Her writing has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She teaches at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Rebecca Spiegel teaches writing in Philadelphia, where she lives with her family. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and Without Her is her first book.

Host or Publisher Tattered Cover Book Store