To Leave for Our Own Country: South Haven Reading and Book Signing

Name: To Leave for Our Own Country: South Haven Reading and Book Signing
Start: 2024-05-06T18:30:00-04:00
Location: South Haven Memorial Library.

Schedule

Mon May 06 2024 at 06:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

South Haven Memorial Library. | South Haven, MI

Poet and South Havenite John Linstrom returns home for this reading from his debut poetry book, To Leave for Our Own Country, published just this April by Black Lawrence Press. After sharing some of the book's poems and the stories behind them, the reading will be followed by a discussion and book signing, and copies of the book will be available for sale onsite from local bookseller Hello Books.
The poems in To Leave for Our Own Country offer a new approach to place-based writing and thought in an often uprooted age. Ranging from the shores of Lake Michigan to the small towns of Iowa and Indiana, and finally landing in the heart of New York City, they follow the course of the American small-town diaspora across three decades of a life, from childhood to the cusp of parenthood, asking what it means to belong to a landscape or community that one is constantly destined to leave. Bringing together the personal, political, historical, and spiritual, and filtering them all through the particularities of place and of his neighbors, human and nonhuman, author John Linstrom celebrates the grace of quiet moments and comings-together as he mourns the dislocations and inhuman rendings of a postmodern world. In attending to each place and stage in life with care and listening for new wisdom everywhere, some leavings take on the character of a return, and some returns have the power to release old pains. In our moment of climate crisis and amid cynical challenges to democracy, each rooted in systems of oppression and inequality, such a departure seems both urgent and necessary to turn the world toward healing.
John Linstrom graduated from South Haven High School in 2006 and was director of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum from 2012-2014. His mother recently retired after a 27-year career teaching in the elementary grades for South Haven Public Schools, and his father recently retired from the ministry, having served as pastor at Peace Lutheran Church from 1992 to 2013. John is the author of To Leave for Our Own Country (Black Lawrence, 2024) and an incoming Assistant Professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana starting this fall. He also is the series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press, and his editions of Bailey's writings include The Nature-Study Idea and Related Writings (Cornell UP, 2024), The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion (coedited; Cornell UP, 2019), and The Holy Earth (Counterpoint, 2015). He currently works at the Climate Museum in New York City, where he lives with his wife and their young daughter in Queens.