Please join us to celebrate the recent publication of Time Under The Overlook by Guy Reed and Trailside Register by Richard Parisio, both from Will Nixon’s Bushwhack Books.
Guy Reed is the author of Time Under The Overlook (Bushwhack Books). His previous books include Second Innocence (Lunchador Press), The Effort to Hold Light (Finishing Line Press), and co-authored with Cheryl Rice Until the Words Came (Post-Traumatic Press). As a filmmaker, he co-directed Water Keeps Time with Katie Cokinos, a documentary about the Esopus Creek. Please visit Guyedwinreed.com for more poems and information.
Richard Parisio is the author of Trailside Register (Bushwhack Books). His chapbook The Owl Invites Your Silence won the Slapering Hol Press Award from the Hudson Valley Writers Center. For twenty-five years he was a naturalist in the Catskills and Hudson Valley for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Cedar Crest College. Please visit Poets & Writers for more information.
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More about Guy Reed
Guy Reed grew up on the outskirts of Minneapolis, but he grew enamored with wild nature on visits to his grandparents' resort on a lake in northern Minnesota, a shangri-la beside a deep blue lake, where his father took him hunting and fishing. By his teens he had fantasies of becoming a mountain man who plied the fur trade in Wyoming or Alaska. On career day in ninth grade he trailed the naturalist around the Carver Park Preserve west of the Twin Cities. In eleventh grade, though, he took a creative writing class that gave him a new ambition. Still, he went to Los Angeles to study acting, then took up screenwriting until he found poetry to be his true calling. Earlier in school, he had been taken by Imagism, the early twentieth century movement inspired by Ezra Pound's "Station at the Metro," a simple poem almost like a haiku that arose from Pound's interest in classical Chinese poetry. Later in adulthood, James Wright and Jack Gilbert became his guiding lights, two poets who conveyed great tenderness through strong simple imagery..
He married Beth in his twenties. Together they lived in Los Angeles, the Twin Cities, and Portland, Oregon, before moving East. Beth had grown up in Manhattan and had a good friend in Saugerties. They found a house in Saugerties, the setting for many of these poems, where they raised two daughters and have now lived for twenty-eight years. Guy's previous books include ? with poems by both himself and Cheryl Rice. (They discovered, perhaps improbably, that poems about Minnesota matched up with poems about Long Island.) His second collection, which addressed the death of his parents, arrived as the pandemic hit, spoiling his plans for live readings. Stuck at home, working in the yard one day, he happened to cut his hand, and as he watched his blood drip into the spring soil, he realized that he'd given many years of his life to this place, so why not write about this place as his next subject. Late that day he wrote the opening poem in this collection, which concludes: "I take my poems from the mountain’s shadow, / I leave my flesh in return."
More about Richard Parisio
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Richard Parisio first found nature in his grandmother's backyard, home to tree snails and butterflies. On weekends his family visited her bungalow near then-rural Lake Carmel, New York, where his father led walks into cow pastures to lay down and watch the summer clouds. At eleven, he moved with his family to Staten Island, which still had farms along with the Greenbelt. As a teenager, he was a nature guide at High Rock Park. Also a high school rebel, he was inspired by Henry David Thoreau's, "Civil Disobedience." In college he graduated to Walden and fell in love with the English Romantic poets. Yet Robinson Jeffers, a coastal Californian known for his celebration of the more-than-human, became Parisio's lifelong inspiration. He majored in geology, but took the humanities just as seriously with classes in Greek, Latin, and mythology.
He wanted to become a park ranger, but jobs were scarce at the time. He found a seasonal stint in the Florida Everglades, then returned north to teach science at a school in Tarrytown. Later he joined the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation as an environmental educator for twenty-five years in the Catskills and Hudson Valley He also wrote a nature column for the New Paltz Times. His chapbook, The Owl Invites Your Silence, won the Slapering Hol Press award given by the Hudson Valley Writers Center. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Cedar Crest College.