Poetry Night: Becky Boling and Susan Jaret McKinstry

Content welcomes Northfield poets Becky Boling and Susan Jaret McKinstry for a delightful evening of poetry. Join us on Thursday, May 15th at 7 pm as Becky reads from her new collection, HERE BEYOND SMALL WONDERS, and Susan reads from her latest release, TUMBLEHOME.

Becky Boling, League of Minnesota Poets poetry prize winner, offers her first collection of 37 poems in HERE BEYOND SMALL WONDERS. Filled with vivid description of locales from the ice-covered pond in her backyard to the vast expanse of Lake Michigan, she works with contrasts of scale, as in Adirondack Chair in Snow, and ironies of context. Her tiny hummingbirds fly the Hudson River. Her poems describe subjects as small as the magnified fly on her windowsill in Musca Domestica. Boling’s language yields striking phrases: Stridulating cicadas populate late summer’s air. Her employ of a conceit terms us “squatters, who lease the land from rabbits… who leave baby carrots on back porch steps…who watch….” A chronological list provides evidence of former tenants who lie in stone gardens under mounds of earth.

TUMBLEHOME is structured like a musical fugue, moving in three sections from the west coast of Ireland to London, then to Galway, and back to a small town in Minnesota as it interweaves and deepens themes of home, time and loss. The poems contemplate vast human history and the small space of our lives in distinct voices and episodes, with closely-observed objects – coins, stones, birds, water – reappearing and echoing to create a harmonic poetic travelogue.

A Pushcart nominee, Becky Boling, the Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. Professor of Spanish and the Liberal Arts, emerita, taught Latin American Literature and Language at Carleton College for 36 years. Her poetry appears in Agates, 3rd Wednesday, Gleam, Lost Lake Folk Opera, Misfit, Persimmon Tree, Willows Wept Review, as well as in recent anthologies: WE LOOK WEST, BRIDGE AND DIVISION, KAKALAK: ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY AND ART, and LITTLE BY LITTLE, THE BIRD BUILDS ITS NEST. HERE BEYOND SMALL WONDERS is her first published collection of poetry (Finishing Line Press, March 2025). A “naturalized” Minnesotan, she was Northfield’s co-Poet Laureate, along with her husband D. E. Green, 2023-2024. Recently, she won Pennsylvania Poetry Society’s First-Place Prize. As Sadie Montgomery, she writes and publishes novels.

Susan Jaret McKinstry has published poems in Plain Songs I & II, Crosswinds, Willows Wept, Red Wing Poet Artist Collaboration, and The Journal of General Internal Medicine. A professor of 19th century British literature, theory, and creative writing at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, she yearns for the sea, and has been lucky to teach in Ireland, Scotland, Norway, London, Florence, and Moscow.