Hours
Sunday 9-5
Monday 10-4
Tuesday 10-4
Wednesday 10-4
Thursday 10-4
Friday 10-5
Saturday 9-5
Sunday 9-5
Monday 10-4
Tuesday 10-4
Wednesday 10-4
Thursday 10-4
Friday 10-5
Saturday 9-5
Join local Russian River Books & Letters for an evening with poet Kelly Gray who will read from her prize winning manuscript from Tusculum Review at 7pm on Friday, December 8th. The Mating Calls of the Specter is a collection of poems told by a young apparition returned to her rural landscape to recapitulate the crimes against her and rise through the coastal prairies to hold us all to account. Prize judge Justin Phillip Reed, winner of the National Book Award, writes, "...it's really the sensual that gets me-- some restoration of faith in the body-poem union comes terrifically alive here, not at least due to the presence of damp animals, sharp instruments, bare stomachs, waft of beer breath, truck exhaust, "thin femurs//jagged alps of opossum teeth."
The reading will be followed by a Q & A with Manjula Martin, author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, (coming in January 2024 from Pantheon Books with a reading at Books & Letters!)
Kelly Gray is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021), The Mating Calls//of the// Specter (Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize, 2023), Our Sodden Bond (MAYDAY Poetry Prize, 2025), and Dilapitatia (Moon Tide Press, 2025) and is the recipient of the Neutrino Prize from Passages North and the ArtSurround Cohort Grant. Gray’s work can be found in Witness: A Magazine of the Black Mountain Institute, Cream City Review, ANMLY, Rust & Moth, Cherry Tree, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Gray lives with her family in a cabin in the woods, nine miles and seven fence posts away from the ocean, and, in addition to her four other jobs, teaches poetry in rural public schools.