Join poet Claudia Stanek and friends for the release of her new book, Beneath Occluded Shine

with Denton Loving and Catherine Farout, Bennington MFA Writing Seminars alumni.

Hosted by Jules Nyquist and John Roche

followed by open mic

Note this is WED April 30th (different from our usual time)

Jules Nyquist and Claudia Stanek are Bennington Writing Seminars alumni class of 2007. Denton Loving and Catherine Faurot are also a Bennington Writing Seminars alum.

It’s a pleasure to welcome Claudia to our featured reading series, along with our Bennington family! Jules created the collage cover for Claudia’s book.

Fifty years after Pablo Neruda completed his Book of Questions, Claudia Stanek bravely reaches back through time—long before Neruda, into the deepest parts of our shared humanity—in search of answers. Threaded with the spiritual, the historical, and the natural, Stanek weaves together these 16 short but powerful poems in Beneath Occluded Shine that embrace the surreal, push up against the paradoxical, and remind readers that sometimes a question can only be answered with another question.

–Denton Loving, author of Tamp

Claudia Stanek‘s Beneath Occluded Shine is filled with questions of life and death–what’s here, what’s gone. Nature with its clouds, land and sea mingle with the invisible as well as language. At the same time, a ribbon of the divine, like a reverent of seasons, winds itself through her lines, as she deals with what must be kept for the living. Her use of rhyme blends into the sounds of what comes before and what comes afterwards in this topography of disappearances and returns.
Fireplaces, foundries, forest, foliage, full…”a standard of tender remains.”

–Gail Hosking, author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter and poetry books, The Tug and Retrieval.

Claudia Stanek‘s poems answer Neruda’s Book of Questions with her own expansive and cantatory meditations. This book is a harmonic and lyric duet, each poem a distillation of the poet wrestling with life.

–Catherine Faurot, author of Theology of the Broken.

Claudia M. Stanek‘s work has been turned into a libretto, been part of an art exhibition, and been translated into Polish. Her poems exist online, in print, and in her chapbook, Language You Refuse to Learn. She holds an MFA from Bennington College.