Debra Allbery, Rose McLarney give poetry reading April 11 at Warren Wilson

In celebration of the publication of her book of poems, “The Always Broken Plates of Mountains,” Rose McLarney and poet Debra Allbery will give a reading at Warren Wilson College on April 11 at 6:30 p.m. The reading in Canon Lounge is free of charge and refreshments will be provided. More details are available from rmclarney@warren-wilson.edu .

Set in the Appalachian landscape, McLarney’s debut collection gives voice to a chorus of speakers – at once plainspoken, reverent, and musical – who navigate what it means to be faithful both to a place and to one another. Allbery’s lyrical poems from her book “Fimbul-Winter” traverse the terrain between what persists and what is “long gone,” between “the promise with its pulled thread” and “the wind that sang through the weave.”

Reginald Gibbons says of Allbery, “A verbal Vermeer of quiet ordinary moments when time uncannily pauses, Debra Allbery has with the keenest sensitivity caught the sound, the scent, and the look of intense and yet elusive meaningfulness…. This is a delicate, artful, haunting book.”

Allbery is the director of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. She won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for her first book, Walking Distance. Other awards include two NEA fellowships, two fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the “Discovery”/The Nation prize, and a Hawthornden fellowship. Her work has appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. She has been writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and Interlochen Arts Academy, and has taught at Dickinson College and the University of Michigan.

Writer Jane Brox has described McLarney’s poems as “work of the first order. Unsentimental, empathic, informed by her unerring eye and ear, they are rooted in a specific quarter of the earth and speak to the complexities of fidelity, devotion, desire, and the force of time…”

McLarney teaches in the undergraduate creative writing program at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, Orion, New England Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Provincetown Arts Magazine. She is currently a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and a Bread Loaf Fellowship, was a finalist for this year’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, her poems won Alligator Juniper’s 2011 National Poetry Prize, and in 2010 she was awarded the Joan Beebe Fellowship at Warren Wilson. She grew up in rural western North Carolina, where she continues to live on an old farm.

Both poets are published by Four Way Books. McLarney earned her MFA degree from Warren Wilson, where she studied with Allbery.