“Navigating the Reach”: A National Poetry Month Reading and Workshop with Mass Book Award-Honoree Mary Buchinger

Join the Somerset Public Library for a special Poetry Month event with Mary Buchinger! Mary will read from her acclaimed collection, Navigating the Reach, and help attendees find their inner poet with a short, generative writing workshop.

In her fourth full-length collection, Mary Buchinger’s lyric and narrative poems take the reader on a journey across geographies, years, and states of mind. The “reach” in the title refers to a treacherous stretch of water between two bays on the Maine coast. With its tidal currents and rocky outcroppings, the reach holds visible and invisible complications. These elegiac poems limn the navigation of passageways—between what is and what was; memory and loss; self and other—and demonstrate how close attention, care, feeling, and intuition can move us forward, though the journey is never without risk.

This program is sponsored by the Mass Book Awards Speakers Bureau and is presented in collaboration with the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

Mary Buchinger grew up on a farm in Michigan, worked in Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer, and earned a doctorate in linguistics from Boston University. One of her poems is permanently installed in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lives and served as Poetry Ambassador, and her 2023 book, Navigating the Reach was selected as a Mass Book Awards Poetry Honors title. She is professor of English and communication studies at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston and for many years served on the board of the New England Poetry Club (founded in 1915 by Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, and Conrad Aiken).