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Book Release Open Mic
November 4, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Join Beckley Art Center on November 4 at 7 p.m. for our Book Release Open Mic event, featuring Mary Ann Honaker! 
This is a free event, and we welcome anyone with a poem, song, spoken word, and more to come out and perform. Mary will be reading from a selection of her newest book, Whichever Way the Moon.
Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019), and the chapbooks It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015) and Gwen and the Big Nothing (The Orchard Street Press, 2020). Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won first place in the West Virginia Writers Contest for Long Poetry in 2022. Her work has been included in Women of Appalachia Projects ’Women Speak anthologies, in Nixes Mate‘s anthology, In the Time of Covid, and in Lily Poetry Review’s anthology, Voices Amidst the Virus. She currently lives in Beaver, West Virginia.
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Here’s what other authors are saying about the collection:
Here’s what other authors are saying about the collection:
Honaker’s poems rise up out of the natural world: the cityscapes and the pollen-dusted sunsets. She knows her landscape well and she uses it to guide us honestly through the nostalgia the sorrow, and the meditations on the human spirit. As much as these poems are portraits of people and places, they also ask questions of us and make cogent observations with a wise and spiritual voice. ~Kevin Carey, author of Set in Stone and Jesus was a Homeboy
The poems in Whichever Way the Moon are rooted in the United States scarred by COVID-19, gun violence, and brutal men, and yet they return to the love “that conjures the melodies.” Mary Ann Honaker’s vision is a world “seen from behind / my sheer curtain, my dark glasses, / my lampshade” but it is illuminated. And in these goldenrod poems, Honaker “calls the soul up to the surface where it glimmers, stony, broken, grassily waving.” ~Jennifer Martelli, author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella
Wholly engaging, often heartbreaking, Mary Ann Honaker’s Whichever Way the Moon is an ambitious and accomplished collection. The thrill of her poetry rests in being a part and a part of the West Virginia landscape, both striking and challenging as the poet confronts and celebrates this otherness. With grace, humor, and insight, Honaker’s unique perspective feels like a long intake of mountain air. A surprise of language from line to line. ~January Gill O’Neil, author of Misery Islands and Rewilding