Please join us for this monthly, hosted book discussion group, featuring a selected title for good and lively talk. On tap for this month is M.T. Anderson's YA novel, The Game of Sunken Places (Scholastic). Two young boys visit an eccentric uncle at his isolated mansion in the Vermont woods and soon find themselves drawn into a riddle-filled game full of twists, turns and the kinds of extraordinary characters only MT Anderson can dream up. This should be fun for all...

This evening's pair of poets3one visiting, one from hereabouts—could each easily hold an evening on her own. Lucky for those here tonight that they are paired for this. With Julie Sheehan, here from her Long Island home, where she teaches at Stony Brook, Southampton, it could also well be at one of our neighborhood's fine (and many) watering holes. Her third collection, Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise (W.W. Norton), is very much a bar- and drink-set book. And an exceedingly accomplished one. "When Julie Sheehan takes the lyric poem out for a few drinks, everyone winds up talking fast and loose. The lush, agreeably-out-of-style cocktails who take the stage in Bar Book tell their stories in voices comic, cracked, and aching, and along the way a narrative of lost love—the story behind every solitary monologue over drinks, in one way or another—unfolds, pulling the reader through this artful, wry, and unlikely book's tale of hearts on the rocks and hearts surviving." – Mark Doty. With poet and University of Washington professor Linda Bierds, over from her Bainbridge Island home, we are talking one of the most honored and awarded poets at work in the U.S. today: two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; Guggenheim, Wolfers-O'Neill, Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundation fellowships; the PEN West Poetry Award; and four Pushcart Prizes. Flight: New and Selected Poems (Marian Wood/G.P. Putnam's Sons) is her most recent of eight poetry collections. "Bierds's poems, with their constantly surprising delicacy and their language rich with insight and a sensuous music, radiate real power and authority and animal presence. Her true originality has no need of quirkiness to emphasize it, and the range of her interests, empathy, knowledge, and imagination is imposing." – W.S. Merwin.