Andrea Potos
Freddie Adderly/Fernwood Press
A book cover.
"Her Joy Becomes," by Andrea Potos, 2022.
Andrea Potos is one of the many bright lights in the Madison poetry community. She will be reading from her ninth collection, Her Joy Becomes, out this year by the nonprofit poetry publisher Fernwood Press. Potos has earned five Outstanding Achievement Awards in poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association and has won the James Hearst Poetry Prize from the North American Review, and the William Stafford Prize in poetry. Expect meditations on the wonder that is life and the mystery that is the moving on from life. Free, but ticket required (a Crowdcast livestream also available).
media release: Andrea Potos' poems are permeated by an expansive sense of kinship. Blood family are precious, but equally intimate are luminary writers with whom she finds soul connections. Although most of these figures are physically absent, all are a vital presence in Potos' "rooms of thought." She recommends (and practices) not getting snagged in appearances but "look[ing] slant" to find what is enduring. This is what she calls "graz[ing] with your consciousness" to gather joy. This is no simplistic pursuit. Rather, she's in agreement with C.S. Lewis' insight that "joy is the serious business of heaven." Potos understands that it takes committed work to choose and own joy. These poems involve aging parents, cancer, dread, death, grief, funerals – the hard times that generate hard questions. But they also celebrate the sustaining "underpinnings of dailiness" – laundry, coffee, washing dishes, brushing hair, bird song, vegetables, floral dresses. As those who are now absent become valued mental companions, she discovers "a peace whisper[ing] to her...a different happiness unfolding." The gift of these poems is in how Potos thoughtfully weighs what is given and what is taken, how life both fulfills and disappoints, and determines to let joy keep her. "Breathing deeply is simple, and hope is the natural choice."
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