The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library present
Poetry At The Library
Jonathan Aaron & Linda Flaherty Haltmaier
Two outstanding poets at the height of their powers
Sunday, October 19
3:00 PM
Goodwin Forum
Concord Free Public Library, 129 Main St.
Join us for an in-person afternoon with award-winning poets Jonathan Aaron and Linda Flaherty Haltmaier who will read and engage in a Q & A about their inspirations and craft.
CFA 2025 POETRY PANELISTS
Jonathan aaron
Jonathan Aaron is the author of three previous books of poems, including Second Sight, Corridor, and Journey to the Lost City. His work has received many honors, including fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell. His poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Raritan, among others, and they have been included five times in Best American Poetry.
Jonathan was educated at the University of Chicago and Yale. He went on to teach English and Creative Writing at Williams College, at Yale, in Harvard’s Expository Writing Program, and finally in the Department of Writing and Literature at Emerson College, where he is now professor emeritus. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jonathan Aaron
ABOUT JUST ABOUT ANYTHING: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
Jonathan Aaron reads from his fourth collection, Just About Anything: New and Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2025).
“A poem uses words to try to get at what can’t be put into words. The best poems remain just out of reach; something in or about them remains mysterious. A poem itself is an inquiry or a search, that is never finished, never fulfilled.”
On Poetry and the Reader
"I've always loved stories--not just `literature,' but personal and historical anecdotes, myths, parables, jokes, rumors, weird news items, the movies. Maybe that's why my poems are basically narrative in character and intent. Long or short, elaborate or plain, they aim to convey in terms of incident or description some kind of information that the reader can make something of. "
“Jonathan Aaron is the master of the noir fable. Ranging from the darkly humorous to the elegiac, the poems in Just About Anything both show and recount how the ordinary can slip at any moment into the unsteady worlds of legend and dream: A dog advises her master to read Solzhenitsyn; a landlady’s husband turns into a giant snake; a man time-travels to tell Bach about the future. Aaron’s haunting collection leads us to places where we experience ourselves––suddenly and unpredictably––’more truly and more strange.”
PRAISE
“In Just About Anything, Jonathan Aaron invites us into a world unlike any other––a place of dark wonders and strange delights, where even the sunniest landscapes can hold mystery and muted menace. In one poem Nikolai Gogol ruins a stew, in another the Invisible Man riffles the pages of a book, in yet another a man bows to the wisdom of a magic horse. Such moments seem natural in the alternate realities these poems explore. And beyond such uneasy fun, a series of powerful love poems reveals the depth of feeling that underlies the inventiveness of this superb collection.”
Linda Flaherty Haltmeier
A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Linda Flaherty Haltmeier has been featured widely in journals and anthologies including Switchgrass Review, WSQ, Ink & Letters, Wild Word, and more. Her debut chapbook, Catch and Release, was published by Finishing Line Press. A graduate of Harvard, Linda leads poetry workshops, gives readings, and promotes poetry on the North Shore of Boston where she lives with her husband and daughter.
Linda Flaherty Haltmaier
Linda Flaherty Haltmaier reads from her collection, Shadows Set to Burn, winner of the 2024 International Book Award for Narrative Poetry. She is the award-winning author of four poetry collections and the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Andover, MA. Named the winner of the Robert Frost Poetry Prize, she is known for her "sensational imagery, her deft ear for the music of language, and her emotional sonar for sounding the depths of love (and anger.)"
Her debut collection, Rolling up the Sky, claimed the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and her follow-up collection, To the Left of the Sun, won the American Book Fest Award for Poetry. Additional accolades include winning the JuxtaProse Poetry Prize and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival Competition, as well as Finalist honors for the Princemere Poetry Prize, the New Millenium Award for Poetry, the Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize, the Rash Award for Poetry, and the Tucson Festival of the Book Literary Award, among others.
“Prepare to devour Haltmaier’s dazzling new collection in one sitting because you simply. can’t. stop. The poet’s language is delicious, vivid, and evocative––each poem an unexpected delicacy. As you set this book down, you will raise your eyes and behold a new world, a more saturated one, a world where grief and love and pain and beauty all break bread at the same table. And what an exquisite feast. These poems abound in the deepest kind of joy, never perfect, often evasive, always “the crow,/the soil,/the dancing/of ancient stars/across a newborn sky.”
PRAISE
“Shadows Set to Burn brings us face-to-face with experiences ‘that cut jagged and deep,’ tempered with consolations ‘teeming with unseen rhythms and magic.’ Universal struggles are made fresh through deft humor and surprising, spot-on metaphors: the Monarch wired for freedom, Harlow’s wire monkey, a spider from remotest Australia, the elusive minnow. You will return again and again to this resonant collection for the solace of words and wonder—and an appreciation of ‘the ordinary divine.”