Elliott Bay Book Company presents Barbara Kingsolver, How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons): Poems Book Event

Beloved novelist, essayist and poet Barbara Kingsolver reads and speaks about her new book, How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons). In this intimate collection, she now trains her eye on the everyday and the metaphysical. Her first volume of poetry, Another America (or Otra América), was published in Seattle by Seal Press in 1992. Tickets include a reading by Barbara Kingsolver, audience Q&A and a copy of How to Fly (sent via Media Mail to addresses in the continental U.S. only).

In How to Fly, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins.

Altogether, these are poems about transcendence: finding breath and lightness in life and the everyday acts of living. It's all terribly easy and, as the title suggests, not entirely possible. Or at least, it is never quite finished.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of nine bestselling works of fiction, including the novels, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the enormously influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver's work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the prestigious Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her body of work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.