Montana Book Festival 2019

Three poets read recent works to celebrate the start of our fifth annual Montana Book Festival.

Night Angler, by Geffrey Davis

Geffrey Davis’s award-winning second collection of poems reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood. Filled with humor and tenderness, Night Angler sings its own version of a song called grace―sung with a heavy and hopeful mix of inherited notes and discovered chords.

And Other Bodiless Powers, by Sarah B Aronson​​​​

Sarah Aronson writes poetry and nonfiction from Missoula, MT. Her first collection of poetry, And Other Bodiless Powers, received the New American Poetry Prize for 2018. Her work can be found in Basalt, Stringtown, Big Sky Journal, and the Bennington Review among others. She is also the host and producer of the Montana Public Radio literary program and podcast, The Write Question.

A Himalayan Poem, by Nishi Chawla 

Nishi Chawla’s fifth volume of poetry - a 120 page long poem titled, A Himalayan Poem (2017), is broken up into eight sections. The long poem is her own personal response to the landscape of the mountains even as the poem explores its physical attributes: its rivers, its peaks and glaciers, its flora and its fauna, its cultural traditions, both secular and spiritual, and its people. Section One is devoted to the origins of the Himalayas. Section Two is about the rivers and lakes found in the Himalayas. Section Three is devoted to the peaks and glaciers. Section Four is about the trees and flowers found in the Himalayas, and Section Five is about the birds and animals. Section Six is about environmental degradation. Section Seven is about temples and monasteries found in the Himalayas. The final section is about what the mountains symbolize.