Fascinating tales of family history, climate catastrophes, and marital drama.

 

Join writers John Gallaher and Luke Rolfes as they share their newest works at Beaverdale Books at Beaverdale Books on Friday, June 14 at 6:30 p.m. 

John Gallaher is a previous winner of the Levis Award and The Boston Review Prize. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and others. The author of five previous collections of poetry, Gallaher has also co-written books with G.C. Waldrep and Kristina Marie Darling, and co- edited collections with Mary Biddinger and Laura Boss.

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Gallaher says about his book, My

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Life in Brutalist Architecture, “It should have been an easy story to sort out, but it took fifty years.” He finally confronts his adoption after a lifetime of concealment and deceptions with lucid candor, startling humor, and implacable grief.  Approaching identity and family history as a deliberate architecture, Gallaher’s poems illuminate how a simple exterior can obscure the structural bricolage and emotional complexity of its inner rooms. This collection explores – and mourns – the kaleidoscopic iterations of potential selves as prismed through our understanding of the past, a shifting light parsed by facts, memories, and a family’s own mythology.

Luke Rolfes grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and currently teaches creative writing at Northwest Missouri State University. He is the author of the novel Sleep Lake, and the short story collections, Impossible Naked Life and Flyover Country. He is the winner of the Acacia Fiction Prize and the Iron Horse Discovered Voices Award.

His book, Sleep Lake, tells the story of, “a catastrophe that is forming beneath the earth, yet the US Army Corps of Engineers is unaware that the soil within the guts of the Sleep Lake dam is becoming permeable. In days, the residential dam will fail, and over seven billion gallons of water will gash through the metro of a Midwestern city. Like the dam, Janie and Thomas Dietrich’s marriage is rotting beneath the surface. Janie, a third-grade teacher, and Thomas, a physical therapist, are happy on the outside, but underneath.  Then, children from Janie’s classroom find a victim tangled and bloody in the woods.