Join author Carson Jordan with local poet Bruce Bennett for a poetry reading and Q&A.

About the book: DEAD HAND is a book of debts and genuflections. Jordan’s poems move between the sacred and the profane, building a fervent theology from lucky license plates and wax phones, French tips and jet black eyeliner, deli meat and dead-hand devotions. Across ruined gardens and rest stops, Persian pools and funeral grounds, the narrator moves through a vast landscape with an unceasing hunger that has no earthly cure. Good time girl and grief embodied, she headlines her own apology tour then quietly holds vigil. Jordan’s constant offerance to the other: a hand outstretched and a philosophy of welcoming with no sudden movements. The world of these poems is one where everything is consecrated, nothing is redeemed, and grace lives where it should, somewhere closer to the ground.

About the author: Carson Jordan is a poet and curator. She is the founder of MIND PALACE POETRY, a third space inspired workshop series, and the inaugural Poet in Residence at the Ruth Stone House in Goshen, Vermont. Her full length debut collection, DEAD HAND, will be out with b l u s h Summer 2026. Her work can be in Bruiser Mag, Noir Sauna, high horse magazine, and ritual dagger zine.

About the conversation partner: Bruce Bennett is the author of ten books of poetry and more than thirty poetry chapbooks. His New and Selected Poems, Navigating The Distances (Orchises Press), received a starred review from Booklist, which cited it as “One Of The Top Ten Poetry Books Of 1999.” Just Another Day in Just Our Town, Poems: New And Selected, 2000-2016, also from Orchises, was published in January 2017 and has now gone into a Second Printing.