Eat My Words is a great bookstore in Northeast Minneapolis—one of those it's hard to walking away from empty-handed. It was a privilege to read with rock-star poet Deborah Keenan, whose new book—her eleventh!--The Saint of Everything, is out now, and Chavonn Williams Shen, who didn't have a book out when I reached out to her to organize this reading, but in the interim landed a book contract. Congrats, Chavonn! Woo-hoo!

A great crowd showed up to listen and linger, including THP pressmate Kirk Wilson. I love talking with folks after readings, when they share morsels from their lives, as if the poetry continues to be made but communally, ephemerally.

I've got the sets down now—short, medium, medium-long, long, with variations for venues—such that it feels like I'm on the stump or am a band on tour writing up play lists in Sharpie to duct tape to the floor of the stage each night.  Despite that, not a reading goes by after which I don't berate myself a bit for forgetting something I wanted to say. I toured Ernest Hemingway's home once in Key West and remember the tour guide telling us that Hem would stop writing when the going was good, when he knew what came next and had more to say. A feeling like that is what I have when I remember that I forgot something. It makes me eager to go at again, to get to next time.

Images: The three that share the same design style are courtesy of Eat My Words staff. The "one of these things does not belong here" image is my creation, using the InDesign skills I honed working in alt-press and children's publishing, featuring a photo taken at dusk in my backyard on an unseasonably hot evening early in warm season.

Charles Rammelkamp has reviewed (click here) A Northern Spring in an online UK publication called The Lake. One of things he writes about is the time stamps in the text messages, in the four preludes, and how they convey a panic that is otherwise not present in the prose. I hadn't seen that until he said it, that juxtaposition. He says that "Three years later, [A NORTHERN SPRING] reads like a memoir, contemporary history, though the repercussions continue. Mauch’s picture of a fractured society nevertheless contains the seeds of healing."

One of the things I love about both blurbs and reviews is seeing my own work newly and more deeply—often more profoundly—by seeing it through the eyes of another. Charles has again done that for me, for which I thank him. I'm still working through the new vision. Still seeing with new eyes.

It is thrilling to be reviewed every time one is reviewed, and strangely—or maybe not strangely at all?—thrilling beyond thrilling to be reviewed in a UK publication. I realize this is the information age and the home place of an online publication really bears little insofar as its reach, insofar as who its readership and audience is. I nonetheless am content to sit for a few minutes in the self-created illusion of UK poets, writers, and readers checking into their favorite online poetry resource and entering the world of A Northern Spring. It is the daydream of the moment.

Having been baptized into Zoom during the COVID spring of 2020, all of my face-to-face, in-the-classroom course moved to the online platform, my connections with friends and family moving there, too, has made me a weary participant in the virtual. Would that I could see the masses raising hands and nodding in solidarity? I feel it.

My aversion, though, over time, has mellowed into acceptance of a new state of things, at least in some realms, one of them being the poetry reading. Properly orchestrated, virtual (using Zoom and other platforms) readings can be quite wonderful, bringing together voices and poetry it would be nearly impossible to bring together any other way. 

Such was the Trio House Press 2023 launch reading. David Groff, Lena Khalaf Tuffuha, Sunshine O'Donnell, Jennifer Manthey and I read for about five to eight minutes each from our new books, which was the perfect amount of time. It makes me want to do more of these readings in a similar format with other voices, other poets and writers.

It makes me wish, too, that there were a center to our contemporary literary universe a la Paris for, what, the first third or more of the twentieth century? Maybe a social media site is the best we can hope for. But that is a social media site I would be an expat in.

The reading went so well that I have been wishing we could get in a bus and go on tour across the country, five unique voices making poetry new for our times the best we know how. If ever there were a time in our country when such a tour could work, that time, alas, is not now. So I dream of it.

Here is a link to the reading, which I have likely oversold, like a film or restaurant review that gets you so excited to experience the real thing that the real thing falls inevitably falls short of expectations:

Trio House Press 2023 Book Release Reading

PHOTO: A bike shop in Paris, in Les Halles, from which we could procure transportation for an imagined moveable feast.