Maple Street Book Shop Hosts Nicole Eiden and Alison Pelegrin on Wednesday

Maple Street Bookshop will host Nicole M.K. Eiden and Alison Pelegrin at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, August 10, at their uptown storefront (7529 Maple Street).

Eiden will be celebrating the launch of her book I Am One of You, and Pelegrin will read from her new book Waterlines.

Kirkus Reviews described Eiden’s collection as “[m]oving poetry that kindly welcomes readers in to sit down and rest awhile.” Eiden’s poems interrogate our connections to one another and the continuity of human spirit. Through poems that employ both narrative and lyric gestures, Eiden examines an ordinary life through everyday objects all the while moving the reader from New Orleans to Ohio and various points in between. This debut collection also includes “Mortgage,” the third-place winner of the Women’s National Book Association 2016 Writing Contest.

Pelegrin is the author of three previous poetry collections, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. She teaches at Southeastern Louisiana University.

In Waterlines, Pelegrin offers poems that describe the terrible power of nature even as they underscore Louisiana’s beauty. The poet moves from the familiar gaudy delights of life in New Orleans to immerse the reader in the vastly different experience of living north of Lake Pontchartrain. In this fractured world, the Bogue Falaya River becomes a highway paved with benedictions, psalms, and praise for ordinary things, as Pelegrin searches the unfamiliar for an incarnation of home.