Three poets share new work, highlighting their latest published collections — Kathleen McClung with her 2024 book, Questions of Buoyancy; Jeanne Wagner with One Needful Song; and Barbara Crooker, with Slow Wreckage.

No charge, but you may want to donate a few dollars to buy the poets a drink or gas to get home! And do buy a book to reward their efforts; one of the three is sure to work well as a gift to someone you love, or may find a sweet spot on your bookshelf at home. We’ll provide wine & bubbly water.

Kathleen McClung is the author of five poetry collections including her latest, Questions of Buoyancy (Longship Press, 2024). Others include the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, Temporary Kin, The Typists Play Monopoly and Almost the Rowboat. Winner of the Morton Marr, Maria W. Faust, and Rita Dove national poetry prizes, her work appears widely in journals and anthologies. In 2024 she was a finalist for San Francisco poet laureate. Guest editor for The MacGuffin in 2021-23, Kathleen teaches English at Skyline College, where she directed the annual Women on Writing conference for ten years. She also teaches for San Francisco State’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) and privately.

“Kathleen McClung may be the finest poet writing in form today. Questions of Buoyancy is a remarkable collection… Wistful and haunting, these exquisite poems deserve to be read and reread.” –Jim Daniels

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Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and four full-length collections: The Zen Piano Mover, which won the NFSPS Poetry Prize; In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press; Everything Turns Into Something Else, published as runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize; and her latest, One Needful Song, winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize. Other recent awards include the Joy Harjo Award, the Naugatuck Prize and the Cloudbank Prize. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review. A retired tax accountant, she lives in Kensington, California.

John Sibley Williams says of One Needful Song, “This is a rare creation of song and scar, of vulnerability and both emotional and structural complexity.”

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Barbara Crooker is author of ten full-length books of poetry: Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024); Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series) (longlisted for the Julie Suk award); and The Book of Kells (Cascade Books), winner of the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, are her newest collections.
The poems in her current collection consider the “slow wreckage” that comes with advancing years. As well as considering the travails of an aging individual, Barbara Crooker uses a wider lens to examine the damages inflicted by society and its failings. And through it all, or despite it all, Crooker finds beauty and hope in the physical world. In Slow Wreckage, she writes with candor, irony, and ultimately, love.

“Barbara Crooker’s previous poetry collections have gained her a wide readership with superbly crafted poems celebrating the daily joys of what she terms an ordinary life, but she has always written, too, about loss… In many of these poems, Crooker widens her focus to include the failures of our society, damages inflicted upon us and upon our Earth as a result of our blindness or our country’s short-sighted policies. Addressing Walt Whitman, she asks: ‘It’s the twenty-first century, in America. Can you still hear us singing?'” –Marjorie Stelmach