Join us in celebrating the launch of Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems. With host David Meischen, and readings from Patricia Spears Bigelow, Barbara Brannon, Claire Vogel Camargo, Cyra S. Dumitru, Chip Dameron, Martha K. Grant, Lucy Griffith, Vivé Griffith, Cindy Huyser, John Milkereit, Allene Nichols, Donna Peacock, Lynn Reynolds, Matthew Riley, Betty Stanton, Chuck Taylor, Eileen Youens, Allyson Whipple, and Vanessa Zimmer-Powell.

Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems is the third collection in a unique series from Dos Gatos Press, Poetry of the American Southwest—following up on Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga (2013) and Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (2016). Each poem is exactly one hundred words, no more, no less. Within this restriction, however, you’ll find poems as varied as the landscape, the history, the people they evoke. Weaving the Terrain includes stunning prose poems and haibun, as well as poems in every shape made possible by a poet’s imagination and the hundred words chosen. Each poem is a concentrated gem on a topic related to the broad area known as the Southwest.

Editors David Meischen and Scott Wiggerman have arranged 211 poems by 151 poets in eight engaging chapters, opening with “These Immediate Splendors,” poems that will immerse you in momentary delights, and closing with “Necklace of Stones,” poems that explore grief, loss, endurance. In between, you’ll find chapters with these evocative titles: “Body of Memory,” “Songs of the Living,” “Sienna and Sand,” “Half-Lives Slowly Ticking,” “All Hunger and Thirst,” and “Rooted in Resilience.” Award-winning poets include Dorothy Alexander, Gloria Amescua, Shayna Begay, Alan Birkelbach, Lauren Camp, Chip Dameron, Gregory Louis Candela, karla k. morton, Elina Petrova, Brenda Nettles Riojas, Sharon Suzuki-Martinez, Larry D. Thomas, and Loretta Diane Walker.