Alison Luterman reads from her new volume of poetry, Hard Listening (Wildhouse Publishing, 2025), and is joined in conversation about her work by Leslie Absher.

Hard Listening focuses on women’s voices raised up in song, poetry, and activism. Spiritual teacher and writer Mirabai Starr has said, “Alison Luterman is one of my favorite poetic voices. The poems in this collection are luminous.”

During the pandemic, Alison started taking voice lessons in order to sing with her musician husband. She did not start out with a firm grasp of pitch or a great sense of rhythm, but had a lot of enthusiasm, a wonderful teacher, and a willingness to work hard. Learning to “speak music”—her husband’s primary language—was the key that opened them up to an unexpected depth of intimacy. The process of learning to sing reminded her of all the singers she had idolized from a young age. She began to listen to those women again, this time with a better understanding of their skills, and she also began to research  what  their real  lives  were like. It became clear to Alison that beyond the glamour lay a world of challenges and sometimes heartbreak that she had not fully reckoned  with  before.  The poems she wrote in homage to those great women singers form the core of Hard Listening.

As this investigation was going on, the United  States fell to fascism.  Alison wrote poems  that  reflected these fraught  politics and redefined her calling as a poet. These poems strive to be in service to all of us who are fighting for democracy, kindness, decency and justice. Alison Luterman’s four books of poems prior to this one are The Largest Possible Life, See How  We Almost  Fly; Desire  Zoo and In the Time of Great Fires. She has published poems in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, Prairie  Schooner, Nimrod, Rattle, The Atlanta Review, Main Street Rag, and many other  journals and anthologies. Two of her poems are included in Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 project at the Library of Congress. Alison lives in Oakland where she has deep and lasting ties with the creative community in the region. Read more about Alison and her work at this link: alisonluterman.net

Joining Alison in conversation, is Leslie Absher, Leslie is a journalist and a writer of true stories, personal essays, and memoir; this usually means disclosing things she’s not “supposed to,” whether it’s about growing up with a CIA dad, swimming with sharks in the San Francisco Bay, or facing cancer and how she chose to move with it instead of “fighting it.” She seeks to cultivate compassion and truth in all her writing. Leslie’s father joined the CIA before she was born, and shortly afterwards her family moved to Athens, Greece, just in time for a coup. She has spent years trying to learn what her Cold War father’s role was in that event. And though she left when she was still a child, Greece is a place she returns to often. She moved around frequently after Athens until she landed in Boston for college. She received a master’s in education from Harvard and taught G.E.D. to high school dropouts. After years apart, she reconnected with her college flame, Susan, a writer and graphic novelist, and moved to Oakland.