Archive Text: Writers’ Workshop graduates Lauren Haldeman and Bridgette Bates read from their new books of poetry published by Rescue Press.

Lauren Haldeman reads from her inventive debut, Calenday. These poems travel the sleep-deprived, hallucinogenic landscape of parenting a newborn—from the otherworldly process of giving birth to the strangeness of extra-physical connection, they build worlds in miniature and madcap and address the tiers of grief that accompany tragic and bewildering loss. Haldeman works as the web developer, web designer, and editor for the Writing University website at the University of Iowa and the Iowa Review, as well as several other websites. Haldeman has been a finalist for the Walt Whitman award and the Colorado Prize for Poetry. You can find her at laurenhaldeman.com

Bridgette Bates reads from What Is Not Missing Is Light, winner of the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize selected by Heather Christle. In What Is Not Missing Is Light, shards of history are sharpened against the imagined experience of various—crumbling, complex, disfigured, celebrated, striking—muses; some statues, some legend, some surfacing from memory. Bates' poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Fence, jubilat, VERSE, and elsewhere. Recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Boston Review Discovery Prize, she lives in Los Angeles where she is the writer-in-residence at the Library Foundation of Los Angeles and a frequent features contributor to the Kirkus Reviews.