Bookplate Author Event: Poet Rachel Trousdale

Rachel Trousdale

The Bookplate is continuing their 2025 season of author lectures on May 14th with poet Rachel Trousdale for a 6pm event at The Kitchen & Pub at The Imperial Hotel. She will be discussing her new book; Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem. Trousdale’s book- an inventive, poignant, and witty collection that speaks to the intricacies of love, both domestic and wild- is the winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize.

“A rare gift in art is directness: to turn a clear, unsentimental gaze on love and grief in all their variations, with no smokey or mysterioso evasions. Almost as valuable is meaningful surprise, the stunned laughter of recognition even if the subject for marvel is loss. The heartfelt, unpredictable poems of Rachel Trousdale attain that kind of discovery.”

~Robert Pinsky, Judge, 2024 Cardinal Poetry Prize

“You can’t literally make modern poems with a laser, nor comedy with a magnifying glass, but if you could and you got it all just right—accurate, even-tempered, and delighted by life’s bizarre turns—you’d get something like this wise, sharp-witted and generally exceptional debut, by a poet who knows what to do when you fall in love as well as what to do when the world spins fast enough to throw you sideways and you have to hold on, for your kids, to your kids. How is a baby like ‘a brood of termites?’ ‘What have we taught our son?’ ‘Where are our robot sharks?’ What if a yeti visited a mature, equable, family-friendly Auden? If any poem, any life, amounts (as the poet says) to ‘an incomplete experiment,’ this one’s got lovely results, a thesis, an antithesis, and six kinds of love: filial, amorous, amicable, intellectual, maternal, and one that remains as an exercise for the reader. ‘I Swear This Is Not Intended as a Back-Handed Compliment,’ one poem declares, and neither is this self-conscious sentence: you can trust these technically gifted sonnets, prose poems, sestinas, poesie concrète, punchlines and acrobatic sentences to take you anywhere, and then (as the poet also says) to bring us home.”    ~Stephanie Burt, author of We are Mermaids and Don’t Read Poetry

Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The Yale Review, Diagram, and other journals, as well as a chapbook, Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone. Her scholarly work includes Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination.

For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or [email protected]. These events are free and open to the public, but reservations are recommended. The Bookplate will continue their 2025 event series on May 21st. Author Henry Corrigan will be discussing his queer horror novel, Somewhere Quiet, Full of Light. Copies will be available at the shop before and after the event. The Kitchen & Pub at The Imperial is located at 208 High Street in Chestertown, Maryland.