The Meeting Place - Dede Cummings

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Biographie:
Dede Cummings is a writer, award-winning book designer, publisher, and commentator for Vermont Public Radio. At Middlebury College, she was the recipient of the Mary Dunning wing Award and attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference as an undergraduate fellow. In 1991, she recieved a fellowship to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers' Workshop. In 2013, she returned as a poetry contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference to work on her poetry collection begun in 1978. Her poetry has been published in Mademoiselle, e Lake, InQuire, Vending Machine Press, Birchsong, Connotation Press, Mom Egg Review, Figroot Press, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Green Mountains Review, Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry, and Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection. She was a Discover/ e Nation poetry semi- nalist. In 2016, she was awarded a writer's grant and a partial fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her rst poetry collection entitled To Look Out From was the winner of the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and was published in the spring of 2017. Her second poetry collection, e Meeting Place, was published in spring 2020 by Salmon Poetry. Dede lives in Vermont on a dirt road, in a solar-powered house her husband Steve Carmichael built, where she designs books and runs Green Writers Press....

Sommaire:
In The Meeting Place, Dede Cummings exposes some of the more interesting cards in the deck of her life. The results are a series of openhearted, straightforward poems, which are as sensitive to the natural world as they are to the inner one. Best of all, they are sensitive to the reader, whose presence is welcomed (if sometimes shyly) into these intimate rooms.
--Billy Collins

In Dede Cummings' The Meeting Place, we find a writer at the height of her powers, reaching back to the past to and not only herself, but also to explore her family's origins, and the sources of love that bind them together. Yet in these open-armed, funny, serious and sacred poems, we also meet ourselves over and over, for Cummings knows that the specific, when lovingly described, becomes the universal. Dede Cummings is 'writing to reach' a world desperately in need of the tenderness and affection that underpin each and every one of her poems.
--James Crews

Neighborhood bullies, first love, the ties that thread sisters, mothers, a long marriage. The poems in The Meeting Place follow the longitudinal lines of family, as well as the globe. They take us to Portugal, Cuba, Vermont, Ireland and beyond. And like the jars of 'achingly red Roma tomatoes, ' Cummings describes, they invite you to open them and feast.
--Danusha Lam?ris...