A READING and book signing to celebrate the publication of Light Rolling Slowly Backwards: New & Selected Poems by Ethna McKiernan

Readers: Ethna McKiernan with Peg Flanagan, Tom Murtha, and James Rogers

Light Rolling Slowly Backwards is Ethna McKiernan’s fifth and most ambitious collection of poetry. McKiernan, who has a gift for metaphor, gives us 120 poems in her latest volume, a third of which are new. Her work, which some critics have compared to Mary Oliver and Adrienne Rich, ranges from the hilarious (police arrest her girl scout troupe of 13-year olds prancing in nighties at midnight on a Chicago street) to an elegy for George Floyd (where she tosses a “grenade of grief up to the sky”) to “The Radiation Room” where she compares the light beams sweeping her body for cancer to the reassuring twinkle of winter constellations overhead and “everyone she’s ever loved.”