Poetry Rainmakers - Dion O'Reilly, Vincent Rendoni, and Francesca Bell

Location: Village Books and Paper Dreams

Address: 1200 11th Street, Bellingham, WA 98225

Date: 18 May

A Mastiff named Tiny, Seattle in the 70s, a house fire that interrupts a girl's life, a predatory mother who attends to her wounded daughter and the many predatory men who swoop in when the destabilized woman is loosed into the world, all of this is woven throughout Sadness of the Apex Predator, a collection of poems that studies both the way Sapiens feed on one another and also the redemption our hungers can bring.

Dion O'Reilly's debut collection, Ghost Dogs, was runner-up for The Catamaran Prize and honorable mention for several awards, including The Eric Hoffer Award. Her second book, Sadness of the Apex Predator, will be published by University of Wisconsin's Cornerstone Press in February 2024.

A Grito Contest in the Afterlife is the winner of the 2022 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets. This award-winning debut looks at a family of swindlers, low-rent mystics, and used car salesmen as they attempt to outrun the inevitable. Taking place over a century across Mexico, Texas, and Washington State, it remixes the Latin-American folktale tradition with breakbeat poetics to deliver a fresh take on culture, death, and the joy to be had in joyless times.

Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of A Grito Contest in the Afterlife, which was the winner of the 2022 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets as selected by Dorianne Laux. His work has appeared / will appear in Prairie Schooner, The Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Sycamore Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions multiple times.

Francesca Bell's second collection of poems, What Small Sound, interrogates what it means to mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril.

Beloved by contemporary German readers, Max Sessner's poetry is gathered for the first time in English in Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems. Painstakingly chosen from Sessner's three collections and from new work, these poems employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday.

Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award, and What Small Sound. She translated Whoever Drowned Here by German poet Max Sessner. She is translation editor at the Los Angeles Review and the Marin County Poet Laureate.