Back Porch Reading Series: Angela Janda and Elizabeth Cohen

In-person reading at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse, Placitas, NM

Outdoor back porch small group seating - reserved ticketed seats

Doors open 5:30 pm Mountain time, reading starts 6 pm, followed by Q & A and conversation

Hosted by Jules Nyquist and John Roche

Books for sale by the authors

Ticket price of $10 includes reserved seat, locally sourced vegetarian pizza from our neighbors Placitas Pizza, beverages including wine, and light refreshments. Free parking on site.

Jules’ Poetry Playhouse bookstore and gallery will be open, in addition to our Little Free Library.

The reading portion of this event will be recorded for our Youtube channel archive. It is NOT a live session.

Angela Janda

Angela Janda is a poet, actor, and Certified Public Accountant. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Rattle, San Pedro River Review, and Whitefish Review. She is the author of the chapbook Small Rooms with Gods (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her play, Out of Thebes, was produced by Theaterwork (Santa Fe, NM) in 2015. Angela lives in Albuquerque, NM.

Her website is:  https://angelajanda.com/

“It’s good to be with Angela Janda in Small Rooms with Gods. ‘There is so much prayer here,’ she says, ‘that a person hardly knows what to do. / But give away parts of themselves, / in pieces, or as a whole thing’— which is exactly what she does in this marvelous collection. She writes from both then and now partly Antigone and always herself. What is especially wonderful is the way Angela lives through Antigone just as she can ‘see through lonely to the wide / open.’ One of the many strengths of this collection is the absolute sparseness and beauty of the language.”

–Joyce Sutphen, Poet Laureate of Minnesota, Author, Naming the Stars

Elizabeth Cohen

Elizabeth Cohen is a writer, editor, journalist, mama, and dog person who hails from New Mexico. She is the author of five books of poetry, a memoir, a book of short stories, and a co-authored book about the first Navajo woman surgeon. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia and recently retired from her position as a professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh to work on her writing and as a full-time book coach. Her newest book of poems, Martini Tattoo, was published in the fall of 2022 by Alien Buddha Press.

Her website is: https://www.elizabethcohen.net/

When I Was a Bird - Elizabeth Cohen

I had the smallest bones

I could breaststroke on the smooth

back of evening

I had no particular anger

Sometimes I made a meal of rain's

leftover wheat 

Certain beetles were enticing

I loved fish

There was a time when I sang to a smaller bird

for days

There was a time when

I pierced the skin of a lake and left mud tracks

on asphalt

I’ve let my shadow follow other

shadows

into the quicksand of night

I’ve slept among sandflies

and fallen down on the miracles of

road-killed mice

After, I evolved into a mongoose

the smallest springbok of a large herd 

a wildebeest

a Talaud flying fox

but I never forgot my ancestry of feather and flock

It was my best life of all

and my most successful

I was married to air

and my hatchlings followed me

everywhere

until one day they left to marry the wind

and became tree frogs

and pink fairy armadillos 

and then, one day

a little girl in Central Park 

with a parasol