Kim Dower, Nina Clements

media release: Join us for an evening of poetry with Kim Dower and Nina Clements!

About Our Mother of Sorrows

In this stunning debut poetry collection, Clements utilizes heartfelt lyricism to explore the hard turns that familial bonds, motherhood, and faith play in the world. These are poems that sing out in a broken bottle chorus of the ways that people share the common, the uncommon, and the unexpectant in light of the world that we are told must be. In Our Mother of Sorrows, we see the ways that familial love and expectations meet the hard edge of tragedy and darkness. These are poems that sing of the sparkling glimmers in the midst of everyday life. Glimmers that reveal the simple wonder, both enlightening and enraging, that comprise a life lived and the quiet, most personal struggles, that people and families endure.

About Nina Clements

Nina Clements earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of the chapbook SET THE TABLE, published by Finishing Line Press, and the poetry collection OUR MOTHER OF SORROWS, published by Urban Farmhouse Press. Her poems have appeared in the Penn Review, Prairie Schooner, the Santa Barbara Literary Journal, and other places. Originally from Pittsburgh, she works as a librarian in Madison, Wisconsin and is a proud member of Women Who Submit.

About I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom

I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom is a rich, complex, heartbreaking and funny anthology of poems on motherhood – being one and having one.

“Kim Dower’s fantastic new collection revolves around quotidian details of domestic life but existential questions are always lurking beneath the surface.”

--The Washington Post

“Deftly constructed, inherently interesting, impressively insightful, thought-provoking, and truly memorable”

 – The Midwest Book Review

“What we inherit from our mothers, what we carry forward, what we never receive, and what we choose to leave behind -- Kim Dower's poetry resonates with the echo of a rich and complex mother-daughter relationship that she gently and carefully unravels, line by line. This is a stunning collection from a poet whose wisdom as a daughter and a mother shines through on every page.  

 -- Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters

About Kim Dower

Kim Dower, City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood from October 2016 – October 2018), has published five collections of poetry: Air Kissing on Mars, described by the Los Angeles Times as, “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” Slice of Moon, called “unexpected and sublime,” by “O” magazine, Last Train to the Missing Planet, “poems that speak about the grey space between tragedy and tenderness, memory and loss, fragility and perseverance,” said Richard Blanco, and Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, winner of the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Award Gold Medal for Poetry.  Her fifth Collection, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom, (April 19, 2022) called “fantastic” by the Washington Post and “Unreservedly recommended” by The Midwest Book Review. Kim’s work has been featured in numerous literary journals including Plume, Ploughshares, Rattle, The James Dickey Review, and Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac." Her poems are included in several anthologies, notably, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, and Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles. She teaches poetry workshops for Antioch University, UCLA Extension Writer’s Program, West Hollywood Library and the Los Angeles LGBT Center.  www.kimdowerpoetry.com