Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Mary Ardery to discuss her debut collection, Level Watch. Mary is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal.

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Mary Ardery is the author of Level Watch (June Road Press). Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and elsewhere. She earned a BA from DePauw University and an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. The recipient of a Lifelong Arts Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission, she was born and raised in Bloomington and now lives in West Lafayette, Indiana with her family.

About the book

Based on her experience as a wilderness guide for women in a substance-abuse treatment program, Mary Ardery’s visceral debut is set deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. These narrative-lyric poems chronicle a labor both physically and emotionally intense: bearing witness to campfire confessions, facing uphill climbs and frigid rivers and wildfires, reckoning with relapses and overdoses. Here is a nuanced exploration of intoxication and recovery, the ways we share and manage pain, and how our personal histories can haunt us but also lead us down transformative paths. Firmly grounded in time and place, part record and part elegy, this is a book for those who have been affected by addiction and all who have ever sought solace or redemption in nature.

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