Join us for a reading with Montreux Rotholtz, Sid Miller, Katy Chrisler, and Stephanie Goehring. We’ll be celebrating the 2017 release of Montreux Rotholtz’s collection Unmark, selected by Mary Szybist as the winner of the 2015 Burnside Review Press Book Award.

‘To mark’ means many things: to stain, to sign, to correct, to celebrate. Montreux Rotholtz’s Unmark ambitiously means much more, performing and undoing those acts, correcting definitions, understandings, and then unraveling those corrections in a headlong, fearless drive toward what is ‘just.’ These poems leave only what ‘claw[s] to remain’—and astonish with the lushness inside that leanness, where ‘the hot cloud [is] slung/around us,’ and the ‘pale green coronas’ of ‘lit sea-lanterns’ ‘fill the space.’ Lyric traditions—confession, fable, love poem, elegy, fugue, prayer—ghost through these constantly inventive poems and let us hear the strangeness of language, its overabundance and partialness, the way it both dissociates and connects. The beautiful, sensual intensity of these poems is haunted, assured: each one leans toward us, ‘feeling/for [our] fragile pressures,’ to ‘clarify [our] ear.’ —Mary Szybist

Montreux Rotholtz is the author of Unmark (Burnside Review Press, 2017), which was selected by Mary Szybist as the winner of the Burnside Review Press Book Award. Her poems appear in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Prelude, jubilat, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.

Sid Miller lives in Vancouver, Washington with his wife and identical twin 6 year old boys. He is the owner of The Triple Lindy, a neighborhood bar in NW Portland, the author of three full length books of poetry, and is the founder and editor of Burnside Review Press.

Katy Chrisler received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has held residencies with the Land Arts of the American West and 100 West Corsicana. Recent work of hers has appeared in Tin House, Black Warrior Review, The Volta, and The Seattle Review. Her chapbook, If It Be A Skeleton, will be out this summer from Walls Divide Press. She currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Stephanie Goehring is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including This Room Has a Ghost (dancing girl press). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she works as a bookseller at Malvern Books and a freelance copy editor. She also serves on the advisory council for Conflict of Interest.