Join poets Caroline M. Mar and Ross White for a reading and conversation at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, North Carolina

In a love letter to two ancestors, Caroline M. Mar reckons with the shapes our bodies take in water and the shapes our bodies take in memory. By the icy waters where drowned Chinese railroad workers lay to rest, Dream of the Lake questions how our family stories slip away from us with each passing generation. Will our memories be preserved, or will we become characters in our children’s children’s retelling of history? These deeply resonant poems are songs of survival, navigating inheritance, identity, and language as they recover voices lost to time and lost to the lake.

Charm Offensive, Ross White's debut poetry collection, explores the space between Dickinson's directive to tell the truth slant and the universal reality of seeing the truth slant without knowing it. Charting the ways that tenderness can resolve into dissonance and uncertainty can resolve into transcendence, Charm Offensive crackles with the dangers of being alive and the joys of remaining defiant. At turns playful and surreal, exuberant and somber, these poems urge readers to find something new to trust in the world.