Poetry opportunities

John Rybicki is a wonderful writer from our very own neighborhood--and, as so often happens, probably finds greater fame and recognition outside of it. So we locals should not miss the opportunity to hear him read from his new book, We Bed Down Into Water, published by Northwestern University Press. Convenient opportunities to do so include:

Monday, March 10, 6:30 p.m. at the Portage Public Library.

Thursday, April 17, 8 p.m. with novelist Paula Nangle at the Little Theatre, Oakland Drive, Western Michigan University, part of the Gwen Frostic Reading Series.

If you haven't read Rybicki's poetry and prose before, Northwestern University Press offers this description of Rybicki's new collection: "John Rybicki offers up an unafraid set of poems in this charged book of verse. We Bed Down Into Water is rich with imagery of family, love, illness, death, and, indeed, water, which seeps in throughout the pages: rivers, pools, rain, and tears. His moving stories, in both prose and verse, struggle to hang on to a vision of the world that can still allow benevolence, luck, and laughter. In this, the collection embodies a contradiction: it is a tender book of fury, a book of bleak hopefulness."