Poetry Reading Series: Ayalet Amittay & Mistee St. Clair

About this event

Free and open to the public. An evening with two poets! Join us this evening to listen to Ayelet Amittay and Mistee St. Clair. Each poet will read and have an in-convo with moderator Michael Wilson.

Ayelet Amittay, The Eating Knife (Fernwood Press, 2025)

Mistee St. Clair, Reconciliations (Empty Bowl Press, 2026)

Copies will be available for purchase at the event.

About The Eating Knife:

The Eating Knife is an exploration of personal and intergenerational trauma through the lens of the Akedah, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Like Abraham, the speaker's father heard voices and directives that led to an impossible bind. The poems in this collection deconstruct and reconstitute the story of Isaac and Abraham, textually and metaphorically, as a means of stitching together meaning after violence and loss. Beyond the unspeakable, these poems hold the possibility of a new way of relating to God, sacrifice, and redemption.

About Reconciliations:

In Mistee St. Clairs debut poetry collection, she explores the universal condition of grief. Of Tanana Athabaskan descent, St. Clair writes of the loss of a parent, first through adoption and the cultural and ancestral loss that follows, and then, in a powerful sequence of poems, of the loss of her birth father to addiction and death. She writes of the challenges of mothering her children as they become adults and of finding a new identity as her marriage ends. In facing these losses, she learns that reconciliation begins with connections: with herself, her dead father, her children, her partner, and the world. Tinged with the bittersweet, grounded in placein poems that range in length, style, and subjectthe poets voice is clear. These brave, honest poems dont skim the surface; they find deeper meaning, believing in love, hope, and renewal, ultimately arriving at their own spirituality, seeing life through the twin lenses of curiosity and love, even in the midst of perpetual rain.