Local poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer will read and perform from her new poetry collection All the Honey at Telluride Arts HQ East on Tuesday May 2, at 5:30 p.m. Co-hosted by Telluride Arts, Telluride Bookstore, Wilkinson Public Library and Talking Gourds, the event is free. The book is available now and the night of the reading at the Telluride Bookstore for $15.
“The title of the book is a nod to how all the honey in the world comes from two opposites—the sweetness of nectar and the bitterness of the pollen that feeds the bees,” Trommer says. “Those extremes are both found in this book—poems that explore deep grief and astonishing beauty.” On that note, the book contains both very playful poems (like Mr. Clean coming to seduce women in their kitchens) and also poems that explore meeting the death of Trommer’s teenage son, Finn, who was a student in Telluride High school.
“Rosemerry is a person in whose presence pain becomes medicine that awakens us to the effervescence of each moment,” says Kim Rosen, author of Saved by a Poem.
“At first I didn’t think both kinds of poems could inhabit the same pages,” Trommer says, “and then I realized, ‘Of course, they can. Because that is what we as humans are asked to do—to inhabit worlds of great joy and great despair at the same time.’”
The result is an honest alchemy. “All the Honey is an outpouring of love from a poet who understands: the world that breaks our heart is the same world that knits it together,” says Phyllis Cole-Dai, co-editor of the popular anthology of mindfulness poems, Poetry of Presence.
This is Trommer’s thirteenth collection of poetry (eleven books and two albums). She served as San Miguel County’s first poet laureate and was selected as the third Colorado Western Slope Poet Laureate. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry and on Carnegie Hall stage. Her collection Hush won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Her new daily audio series, The Poetic Path, can be found on your phone on the Ritual app, her daily poetry practice can be read on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils, and she is co-host of the popular podcast on creative process, Emerging Form.
Say the publishers Elizabeth Dilly and Steven Nightingale, “What is shared here is a way forward in life, a fierce openness that refuses nothing—that knows damage and healing, darkness and radiance, sorrow and winged resurgence, reflection and laughter and learning.”
The gallery will be featuring a Telluride Mountain School student exhibition and live music will be performed by Warren Gilbreath.