Join us for a reading with poet H.G. Dierdorff celebrating the release of her new book, Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter.
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2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Poetry Prize winner
Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter is a story about leaving religion and coming of age in a world of accelerating climate apocalypses and environmental loss. In her debut collection of poems, H. G. Dierdorff interweaves an investigation of wildfires in Eastern Washington with a personal account of growing up in Christian fundamentalism, calling our attention to the violent histories undergirding both.
“I want you to touch the fire / sparking from my lips” the opening sonnet commands, daring the reader to abandon the safety of analytical distance and draw near to the moment of ignition itself. The voice that emerges is incessant, ecstatic, explosive. Fire erupts from every page, multiplying into rage, desire, judgement, responsibility, and renewal.
A love song to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a dramatic portrait of a daughter struggling to find her place in her family, and a philosophical exploration of the limits of language and belief, this collection demands the necessity of both pleasure and grief as responses to a world on fire. -
H. G. Dierdorff is a poet from the scablands and pine savannas of eastern Washington, the ancestral, unceded land of the interior Salish people. She is the author of Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter, which was selected for the 2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Nevada Press in 2024. Her work has been awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and appeared in journals such as Cut Bank, Arkansas International, and Willow Springs. You can currently find them in Oregon, where they volunteer with Write Around Portland and teach poetry through Literary Arts.