Parnassus Books welcomes Luann Landon and Jeff Hardin as they read from and sign their newest works of poetry.
Luann Landon will read from South Bound.
The elegant poems of Luann Landon’s South Bound create an entire, resonant world of lived and shaped experience, colored by the tones of the South.
She “takes us on a journey to the American South and illuminates lives of those bound by the history and customs of the region.” (Timothy Steele)
After the success of her memoir-cookbook, Dinner At Miss Lady’s --stories and recipes remembered from childhood summer visits to her grandparent’s house in Georgia--Luann Landon began writing poetry. South Bound is her first published book of poems.
Born in Georgia, she grew up in Nashville, attended Hillsboro High and Harpeth Hall School, graduated from Radcliffe College, and lived for several years in France, where she studied at the Sorbonne. She lives now in Sewanee, TN, where her husband, David Landon, is Professor of Theater Arts, Emeritus, at the University of the South.
Jeff Hardin will read from Small Revolution.
In Small Revolution Jeff Hardin is a day-to-day wizard, a shaman of moments. He praises those who converse with dragon flies, willows and people no longer here; those who are off “studying moss,/finger-nudging an ant,/shrugging at evidence,/believing/otherwise.” Hardin’s poems honor solitude, missing “what’s most essential: wind and rain against a window;/who [he’s] been; some time alone;/a ripple on a pond gone back to still…” He reminds us that “there are movies you can’t get anywhere else/except by standing in a field, remembering how,/once,/you were a spirit in moonlight,/mended by wind through sage grass.” And even though Hardin ends “To Fellow Poets” with “I guess I’m asking could we be naïve enough/to be naïve again,” he is anything but naïve. He personally understands sorrow and loss in our world and, even so, invites us to stand with him, spirit-filled and “mended.” These lyrical, witty, sensory-rich poems understand the iffyness of existence and how personal syllables form a silence—a language of hope—in a nebulous world. Readers who approach these poems again and again will discover Hardin’s revolution anything but small. - Bill Brown, author of The News Inside and Elemental
Jeff Hardin is the author of four collections of poetry. Nearly 500 of his poems have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Gettysburg Review, Southwest Review, Poetry Northwest, Tar River Poetry, The Florida Review, Southern Poetry Review, Zone 3, and many others. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. He is professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN.