A book launch and poetry reading by Linda Bierds from her new book The Hardy Tree.

ABOUT THE HARDY TREE

The Hardy Tree engages figures such as Thomas Hardy, Alan Turing, and Virginia Woolf in a thrilling exploration of power, oppression, and communication. Linda Bierds flexes modes of agency in interactions with found, familiar, and invented texts—interrupting, troubling, and inhabiting borrowed lines and historical narratives and unpacking the concept of coding. Each poem is a lively conversation, using forms such as the pantoum, erasure, mirror poem, and the cento to create a woven, textured
feel. The book takes its title from the ash tree that stands on the grounds of the St. Pancras Old Church in London, where gravestones for the unclaimed dead, once set in symmetrical rings around the base of the tree, have been moved by time and roots—like the texts in The Hardy Tree—into a haunting fusion of past and possibility.

ABOUT LINDA BIERDS

Linda Bierds was born in Wilmington, Delaware and raised in Seattle, Washington. She earned her BA and MA, with an emphasis in fiction, from the University of Washington. Bierdss many collections of poetry include Flights of the Harvest Mare (1985); Heart and Perimeter (1991); The Ghost Trio (1994), which was a Notable Book Selection by the American Library Association; The Seconds (2001); First Hand (2005); Flight: New and Selected Poems (2008); and Rogets Illusion (2014) was a longlist nominee for the National Book Award. In Blackbird Susan Settlemyre Williams praised the scope and persistence of Bierdss vision: Flight with its thirty-four-year perspective on her career, strongly suggests that Bierds is writing, if not in, then at least out of the Northern Renaissance, that period and culture in which Dutch, Flemish, and German artists and scientists imposed their own sensibilities on the spirit of discovery and invention that began to the south. Like those old discoverers, Bierdss poetry explores the trajectory of human possibility.

Bierds is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and the MacArthur Foundation. She has received the PEN/West Poetry Prize, the Washington State Governors Writers Award, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, and four Pushcart Prizes. Bierds is the Grace M. Pollock Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington. She lives on Bainbridge Island.