Montana Book Festival 2019

Susan Kay Anderson, Mezzanine

Mezzanine is part animal dream, part love song / song of despair about the worlds that drift through the night janitor’s empire, and part eternal desire to make meaning of the illogical evidence before us. The glittering poems by Susan Kay Anderson speak their own realities, talk amongst each other, and shape a world informed by the refusal to look away, desire for connection, and absolute attention to the details. It’s this world of matter, how it drifts in and out of other matter, all of it stories and important, that informs this exciting work.
–Jennifer Boyden, author of The Mouths of Grazing Things


Virginia Barrett's poetry invites an excursion into a varied landscape of voice and form. Stylistically, poems range from intimate lyrics to expansive narratives. The work can be playful, meditative, visionary, challenging, and open to experimentation. Her thematic span uses a wide lens. Poems include female-centric pieces on childhood and family history, ekphrastic works exploring issues that artists often face in unsupportive (even hostile) societies, urban-inspired musings, adventures into myth, and mystical encounters in the natural world. What weaves throughout her work is a deep need to look out at the world, to gaze as does a painter, to absorb what the eyes see and to offer it back—altered and transfigured in some way.

Jessica Jones, Bitterroot

Montana Poet Laureate, Lowell Jaeger, writes: "Bitterroot is a collection of poems written by a young teacher who is herself still learning. The best teachers are the ones who don’t offer easy answers for hard questions, and JessicaJones’ poems raise a galaxy of hard questions. Bitterroot asks the reader to consider the complexities of Native and non-Native co-inhabitation in northwest Montana, valleys and vistas of triumph and hardship. In “Hauling Wood,” a neighbor loans the teacher his ex-wife’s snow pants and boots, which causes the teacher to feel “small and important at the same time.” In reading these verses, I feel small and important, and you will too. The spirit of Bitterroot is this: Let’s learn together and never stop. And let’s be grateful to those who teach us, everyone, everywhere.