small towns

Lynn Emanuel reads from her third collection, The Dig (1992), which includes many persona poems focused on small town life in Nevada and the impacts of nuclear weapons testing. She opens with an early version of "The Politics of Narrative: Why I Am a Poet," which would later appear in Then, Suddenly— (1999).

Stephen Dunn opens with poems from Full of Lust and Good Usage (1976), which would be published the year following this reading. He then reads from Looking for Holes in the Ceiling (1974) before closing with poems that would later appear in A Circus of Needs (1978).

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).