Madelon Sprengnether reads from her new books: "Great River Road" and "Near Solstice: Prose Poems"

Author, editor, and professor Madelon Sprengnether considers the uses of memory.

Great River Road is about memory and memoir writing in later life. Personal memory, as we now know, is fluid, flexible, malleable--blending current experience with remembered events. Memoir writing, like memory, reconstructs the past in the light of the present. In this way, painful or even traumatic events--such as the author’s father’s drowning when she was nine years old--may change over time in ways that open new avenues of insight and self-awareness.

“Great River Road is a candid personal story and a far larger one: an intriguing take on the challenge of revisiting our lives, taking pleasure in old joys, and overcoming our natural resistance to the painful parts.”--Rosellen Brown

----

Near Solstice: Prose Poems is a series of interlinked poems, which read like meditations. This collection deals with the death of parents, family members and friends in the context of the passing of seasons, the vicissitudes of sexuality, the consolations of landscape, and the significance of light.

“Madelon Sprengnether’s short prose poems surprise us with their quick turns and telegraphic insights, their physical bearing—what she calls ‘bodyworlds’—and spiritual poise.”--Edward Hirsch

----

Madelon Sprengnether is Regents Professor in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches literature and creative writing. She is the author of a collection of lyric essays (Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreams; New Rivers Press), a memoir (Crying at the Movies: A Film Memoir; Graywolf Press), two collections of poems (The Normal Heart;New Rivers Press; and The Angel of Duluth: White Pine Press) and a co-editor of a collection of travel writing by women (The House on Via Gombito; New Rivers Press). For further information, please visit www.madelonsprengnether.com.