Caroline Goodwin / The Paper Tree

Booksmith hosts an evening of poetry and conversation with Caroline Goodwin (The Paper Tree) and Linda Norton (The Public Gardens). Please join us for this special Friday evening event!

The poems in The Paper Tree are redolent in sound and rich in the details of place. Caroline Goodwin deeply knows these landscapes of which she writes, goat hair and fireweed and cedar. She spins words with such velocity and cunning that the poems weave a spell. One arrives out the other side wild with rainwater and moss, mussel shells and lupine. This is not a collection to read once, but to savor and return to again and again.

– Erin Coughlin Hollowell, author of Pause, Traveler

The Paper Tree is a brave, luminous, and beautifully wrought book “where the need to name the shape / does not even exist / and nothing can be pinned / down or held as evidence.” It begins with stems and stones, death and beads. Then Goodwin takes us deep into a teeming world characterized by perhaps, where tiny gold frogs hop away and leave a cool sheen on the arms (“A kind of sleeve”) and medicine grows in the rushes. Ultimately, the edges of that mythic landscape blur into the relentlessly technological, political, and embattled present. But when we finally enter the familiar world (of radiation, mass-incarceration, and friend requests), we do so with a broadened sense of these key particulars: mother, father, daughter, sister, ghost.”

– Chiyuma Elliott, author of California Winter League and Vigil

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Caroline Goodwin was born and raised in Alaska and moved to California in 1999 to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. She is also the author of Kodiak Herbal (MaCaHu Press, 2008), Text Me, Ishmael (Literary Pocket Book Series #2, 2012), Trapline(JackLeg Press, 2013) and Peregrine (Finishing Line Press, 2015). She lives in the Bay Area and teaches at California College of the Arts and the Stanford Writer’s Studio. From 2014 – 2016 she served as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, CA.

Linda Norton is the author of a chapbook, Hesitation Kit (EtherDome), and a book, The Public Gardens: Poems and History (Pressed Wafer; introduction by Fanny Howe), a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize in 2012. Her second book, Wite-Out, is scheduled for publication this year. She is also a visual artist. Her collages have appeared on the covers of books by Claudia Rankine, Julie Carr, and others, and were exhibited in Ireland in 2014 at the Dock Arts Centre, courtesy of a grant from the U. S. Embassy in Dublin. In 2017 Linda became a citizen of Ireland/EU. You can find collages, reviews, interviews, and excerpts from her books at thepublicgardens.blogspot.com.