Hearst Center for the Arts
Cedar Falls, IA
Now in its 11th season, the Final Thursday Reading Series features guest regional authors and provides a forum where local writers can share their own work. FREE to the public. Open mic signup is at 7:00. Share your best five minutes of original poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. The open mic begins at 7:15 and the featured author takes the stage at 8:00. There will be a short question and answer period as time allows. Sponsored by Final Thursday Press, The University of Northern Iowa College of Humanities, Arts, and Sciences, and Cup of Joe.
The 10th Anniversary display in UNI's Rod Library.
Poetry by Kimberly Groninga
$7.95
Kimberly
Groninga makes a splendid debut in her new chapbook of poetry Other Things that Grow. In this work,
we learn to perceive the world with a more care and with a more precise lens.
Groninga views common objects--the barrel of a flute—common experiences—falling
asleep—and common places—a tree in her backyard-- with unusual detail and
insight. Groninga approaches her world from the angle of a fine sculptor to
reveal the true essence of what we take for granted in the environment around
us.
--Mary Swander,
Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa, author of The Girls on the Roof.
Kimberly Groninga’s debut collection, Other Things that
Grow, is like a constellation of stars, winking bright and hard in a winter
sky. Her scintillating poems often orbit around the organic, the natural and
quick: aphids riding “tiny helicopters” from a cottonwood tree, a lover like a
beetle “grasping you with appendages,” a “whodunit ladybug red / like zooming
copper,” a child “who waves like a pennant, ripples and snaps / like a flag.”
Groninga looks our bright and hard lives dead in the eye and comes away with
sharply observed truths to help us all understand deeply our own worlds. Brava,
Kim.
-- Vince Gotera, author of Fighting Kite and Ghost Wars
