Caroline Goodwin, The Paper Tree Reading

Come hear spectacular poet and delight, Caroline Goodwin read from her collection, THE PAPER TREE. Have the chance to get your book signed and spend the evening with us at Page Turner, mingling and munching on light hors d'oeuvres.

CAROLINE GOODWIN teaches at California College of the Arts and the Stanford's Writer's Studio. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford, she is the author of TRAPLINE, PEREGRINE and THE PAPER TREE. She holds a BA in biology from Colorado College and a MFA in poetry from the University of Columbia. Born and raised in Alaska, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her daughter.

In THE PAPER TREE, Caroline Goodwin gives us an evocative journey through time and place. Her poetry carries emotional traces of sun-warmed afternoons where bark and moss emanate from the pages as true senses. With a cadence that flows like the special rivers of her poems, she writers for all of us to feel included in her dreams.
--Jerry Garcia, author of Hitchhiking with the Guilty and On Summer Solstice Road

THE PAPER TREE is a brave, luminous, and beautifully wrought book “where the need to name the shape/does not exist/and nothing can be pinned/down or held as evidence” (42). It begins with stems and stones, death and beads. Then Goodwin takes us deep into a teeming world characterized by perhaps, where tiny gold frogs hop away and leave a cool sheen on the arms (“A kind of sleeve”) and medicine grows in the rushes. Ultimately, the edges of that mythic landscape blur into the relentlessly technological, political, and embattled present. But when we finally enter the familiar world (of radiation, mass-incarceration, and friend requests), we do so with a broadened sense of these key particulars: mother, father, daughter, sister, ghost.
--Chiyuma Elliott, author of California Winter League and Vigil