Susan Oringel will read from her first full length book of poetry Carnevale at 12p.m. on Sunday, March 17, 2024 in the sanctuary of Unity Church and will sign books afterward. Here’s how she describes her background and the themes of the book:

I am a local poet, writer, and psychologist whose full-length book of poetry Carnevale was published by David Robert Books the end of November, 2023.  Carnevale is a journey in poetry through the lives and deaths of my parents–who both grew up in Coney Island in the 30’s and 40’s–and of my partner Don Howard, all of whom died within a five-year span from 2002-2007.  It is also a remembrance of foods, cooking, laughter, get-togethers, Kennedy’s assassination and the bombing of the Twin Towers, memories both personal and national, and of my passage through grief and the trudging steps taken back toward the living.

“The poems of Carnevale grow in intensity as they go––as recollection grows closer in time and intimacy, they invite the joys of Eros in, and then, with ‘the awful fact of after…’ deal so movingly with loss and the transit of grief: ‘What’s left, a love that flares inside…’ And, in their strong cadences and the eloquent parallels of their images, the poems open that interior to us, ‘And then begin again.’”
—Eleanor Wilner, Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems

Read Sue’s poem “Cardinal”