evolution

Thalia Field reads from Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010) with University of Arizona MFA students Mike Coakley, Kendra Mullison, and Erin Zwiener. Each selection is read poly-vocally, i.e., one reader per paragraph.

W. S. Di Piero reads poems from his fifth collection, The Restorers (1992), as well as poems that would later be published in Shadow Burning (1995). The poems are inspired by place—particularly California, Italy, and Philadelphia—and subjects as diverse as natural history, the lives of the saints, and the realm of Faerie.

Poet David Baker gives a collaborative performance alongside Lauren Baba, Andrew Rowan, Alina Roitstein, Harrison Kirk, and Gregory Uhlmann of the River Song Quintet, who perform musical settings of his poems. Included in this performance are uncollected and new poems, as well as poems from Baker's collections The Truth about Small Towns (1998) and Scavenger Loop (2015).

As part of the Terrain.org 25th Anniversary reading, Derek Sheffield reads poems via Zoom on the connection between humans and the natural world, drawn from his collections Through the Second Skin (2013) and Not For Luck (2021). He also discusses and reads from two anthologies he co-edited, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (2023) and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (2020). This reading was originally given alongside Julie Swarstad Johnson and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.