Both poets have new books to read from: Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Karen Hildebrand) and Posttraumatic (Ron Riekki).

About Karen Hildebrand’s Crossing Pleasure Avenue, one reviewer had this to say: “Karen Hildebrand’s poetry is like sociology—if sociology could be felt by the hairs on one’s neck and seen in fragrant, Fauvist Technicolor. Her brilliant debut full-length collection, Crossing Pleasure Avenue, reminds us of the strangeness of the everyday and the pleasure in those ripe moments when the past and the present buckle and overlap.”

Ron Riekki’s Posttraumatic (from Hoot & Waddle) “is at turns heartbreaking and hysterically funny, profound and absurd, filled with acerbic wit and a sense of childlike innocence. Drawing on Riekki’s experience in the military, as an EMT, as an actor, his time at a marketing firm in China, and much, much more, the essays contained in Posttraumatic are at times hard to believe, but are never short of brutally honest.”