Book Launch & Poetry Reading of Downfall of the Straight Line

In person and live-streamed on the SFL YouTube Channel.

September 8, 2024, 5pm

Stonington Free Library, 20 High Street, Stonington, CT 06378

Book Launch and Poetry Reading with Charles O. Hartman and Martha Collins

Stonington, CT – On Sunday, September 8th at 5pm, join the Stonington Free Library for an exceptional evening of poetry as Charles O. Hartman and Martha Collins come together for a joint reading of Hartman’s latest collection, Downfall of the Straight Line. The event will take place at the library at 20 High Street and will also be live-streamed via the SFL YouTube Channel.

Charles O. Hartman has published eight collections of poetry, including Downfall of the Straight Line (Arrowsmith Press, 2024), as well as books on jazz and song (Jazz Text, Princeton 1991) and on computer poetry (Virtual Muse, Wesleyan 1996). His Free Verse (Princeton 1981) is still in print (Northwestern 1996), and Verse: An Introduction to Prosody was published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2015. In 2020 he co-edited, with Martha Collins, Pamela Alexander, and Matthew Krajniak, a volume on Wendy Battin for the Unsung Masters series. He is Poet in Residence Emeritus at Connecticut College. He plays jazz guitar.

Martha Collins’s eleventh book of poetry is Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022); her tenth, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the William Carlos Williams Award. Her fifth volume of translated Vietnamese poetry is Dreaming the Mountain by Tuệ Sỹ (Milkweed, 2023, with Nguyen Ba Chung). Her website is marthacollinspoet.com

In anticipation of the event, the Stonington Free Library will showcase a special display featuring the works of Hartman and Collins, along with books that have inspired them. We invite visitors to explore this curated selection of literary works.