Sisterhood and Stanzas: Women and the Art of Poetry

Join the Georgia Center for the Book for an evening of poetry featuring Claire Bateman, Riki Bolster, Hester L. Furey, and Amy Pence. They'll all be reading from new collections. Registration is free but requested.

About the Poets & Collections:

Claire Bateman is the author of the hybrid collection The Pillow Museum (FC2 Press, January 2025) and nine poetry books, most recently, Wonders of the Invisible World with 42 Miles Press and Scape with New Issues Poetry & Prose. She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Tennessee Arts Commission, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Poetry Prize, also twice.

The Pillow Museum is a collection of 56 flash fictions, lyric micro-essays, and contemporary fables set in various simulacra of our world. Claire Bateman’s gorgeous prose captures the imagination with closely observed details of people and places that are startlingly familiar yet unreal, where nothing can be taken for granted, including narrative logic: "It was snowing the night they had the fight about the glass piano whose music provided all the light in the house." In an authoritative voice that offers no apologies or justifications, The Pillow Museum evokes a closely observed slipstream strangeness that refuses to take any moment or detail for granted—a fruitful, delirious disruption.

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Born in Greven, Germany, in a displaced persons camp, Riki Bolster emigrated to the United States in 1949. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania as part of a close-knit Latvian immigrant community. Much of her writing speaks to these experiences. She holds a BA in English from Eastern University and an M.Ed in Special Education from the University of Georgia. A former journalism teacher, Riki Bolster enjoyed a 19-year tenure at Grady High School (renamed Midtown High School). Upon retirement, Bolster created and coordinated the Grady High School Writing Center, a part-time, after-school program that encouraged students to enjoy the writing experience. Bolster honed her editing skills on writing grant proposals, feature stories and presentations working for the Atlanta Alliance on Developmental Disabilities. Additionally, she served as first editor of Saving the Georgia Coast, published by the University of Georgia Press, 2020.

Ilze’s Daughter invites you into the intimate world of an immigrant girl growing up in rural Pennsylvania. A memoir in verse, this collection of poems captures experiences of displacement, loss, struggle, first love, family, resilience. Bolster traces her family’s uprooting from WWII occupied Latvia, abandoning her mother’s farm (“Don’t ask me/ I really can’t say/ if fear surged up suffocating/ mother so breath came only/ in gasps/ as she climbed/ onto an overloaded wagon . . .” The images and vignettes are personal and crack open a door into her world of duality: honoring her Latvian heritage and grieving her mother’s losses, yet discovering a new world of delights, (“We called them the Rockies/ huge boulders as if some god/ had scattered them among the trees/ just for us to climb and skin our knees.”), the comradeship of six siblings, and falling in love with an American boy.

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Hester L. (“Lee”) Furey is assistant professor of English at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College. A poet and literary historian, Furey specializes in archival research and hidden histories. In addition to publishing scholarly and reference book items including the edited volume Dictionary of Literary Biography 345: American Radical and Reform Writers, Second Series, Furey is the author of two books of poems, Skeleton Woman Buys the Ticket (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and House of Jars (Frayed Edge Press, 2024).

House of Jars weaves together three sequences of poems: the journey of a character called Skeleton Woman through a mental health crisis triggered by menopause and environmental illness, the stories of a pantheon of modernist doctor-writers whose mental health struggles changed their writing, and the Conjuring Moses cycle. From the start, House of Jars invites us into a world in which multiple timelines erupt into each other. Sometimes a broken down old house turns out to be a portal to an underworld, and a spider becomes a guru. The collection centers on the experience of not knowing what is real, of living a long time with a version of reality that is not easy to verify but that occupies a lot of psychic real estate. Like Moses, Skeleton Woman spends some time in a wilderness. Hers is hidden inside what looks like an ordinary world. Encountering the weight of collective grief, the omnipresence of magic, the ever-present origin, she comes away with very few certainties.

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Amy Pence authored the poetry collections The Decadent Lovely and Armor, Amour as well as the chapbooks Skin’s Dark Night and Your Posthumous Dress: Remnants from the Alexander McQueen Collection (dancing girl press, 2019). Her hybrid book with Emily Dickinson at its speculative center— [It] Incandescent – (Ninebark, 2018) won the Eyelands International Poetry Award in Athens, Greece. She’s also published short fiction, interviews, and essays in a variety of magazines, including The Writer’s Chronicle and Poets & Writers. Red Hen Press will publish her debut novel, Yellow, in 2026. She taught composition and poetry classes for many years, including at Emory, tutored high-schoolers at Pace Academy and is now a freelance tutor in Atlanta.

The poetry collection We Travel Towards It navigates the climate crisis in the way it impacted Pence— a 90-foot oak tree crushed her house after Hurricane Irma as she ran to the door. The poems trace how cataclysmic events call everything into question: relationships, the deaths of loved ones, and how we live our lives. Ultimately, knowing her path could not have been otherwise, she experienced the treefall as a gorgeous gift: cleaving her old life away and replenishing her sense of wonder for our fragile universe.