Poetry Reading: Anne Marie Macari, Judith Vollmer, and Carey Salerno

Join us for a night of poetry with local poets Anne Macari and Judith Vollmer and visiting poet Cary Salerno.

Join us for a night of poetry with local poets Anne Macari and Judith Vollmer, and visiting poet Cary Salerno. We are honored to host them and hear them read from their respective new collections: Amerigun by Anne Marie Macari, The Pavese Stone by Judth Vollmer, and The Hungriest Stars by Carey Salerno.

Amerigun by Anne Marie Macari

In Amerigun, a stunning collection of loss and rediscovery, poet Anne Marie Macari revisits her brother Edward’s long-ago death by a self-inflicted gunshot. Interweaving and disentangling her own memories and those of her family, and by reconstructing a legal and medical paper trail, Macari begins a dialogue with the dead, bringing her brother’s lost voice back to her after years of sealing herself off from him. Embedded in her story is the devastation of a culture that elevates guns and violence over the sacredness of human life. Yet, out of that devastation, Macari writes a kind of love story, renewing her connection with her brother, as well with other departed friends and family. By revisiting grief, she uncovers a deeply-felt gratitude for the world around her—and indeed for her own life.

The Pavese Stone by Judith Vollmer

Inspired by the legacy of Cesare Pavese, Judith Vollmer’s The Pavese Stone unfolds across the Italian countryside and burrows deep into the interior landscapes of memory, mortality, and connection. This is a vivid, haunting, and intimate meditation on the porous boundary between life and death, the longing for communion, the brutality of reality, and the quiet grace that resides within it.

In these pages, fortitude, elegy, and quiet dignity are interwoven with a profound desire for expansion. Vollmer’s poems offer a sharp attentiveness to the textures of daily life, remaining firmly grounded in the physical world even as the speaker questions the soul’s place within it. This is a book of deep listening and keen observation, where even the smallest gesture—such as severing the leather cords of a tethered owl—becomes an act of radical grace. The Pavese Stone reminds us of the power in meeting another’s gaze and truly witnessing.

Near the end, Vollmer invites the reader to embrace and celebrate the ceremony of what one might even consider an unceremonious life: "Here is a ring I would slide onto your finger, / a plain thread." The poems of The Pavese Stone find their beauty in the ordinary, elevating moments of stillness and loss into sacred space.

The Hungriest Stars Poems by Carey Salerno

With language flush with and supercharged by Eros, Carey Salerno's third book is a poet’s elegy to her uterus, her love letter penned in an overcrowded room to autonomy and desire. Having been debilitated and rendered infertile by endometriosis, endured rounds of infertility treatments that landed her in miscarriage and selective reduction treatments, and suffered a cancer scare that left her body incapable of conceiving, Carey Salerno responds with these maximalist poems. Through them, she dives headfirst into the world with an intense hunger to live to the fullest, to release the shame the she has amassed about her own body and its refusals to function, reflecting on and redefining what it means to be a woman when so much is taken from her.

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ANNE MARI MACARI is the author of six books of poetry, including the forthcoming Amerigun, (Persea, ‘26), and most recently Red Deer and Heaven Beneath. Macari’s first book, Ivory Cradle won the Honickman/APR First Book Prize in 2000, chosen by Robert Creeley. With Carey Salerno she edited Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books. Her poetry and essays have been widely published in magazines such as The Iowa Review, Field, and American Poetry Review.

JUDITH VOLLMER's seventh book of poetry, The Pavese Stone, is published by Alice James Books in March 2026. The Sound Boat: New and Selected Poems, was awarded the 2022 University of Wisconsin Press Four Lakes Prize; other collections have been awarded the Brittingham, the Cleveland State, and the Center for Book Arts publication prizes. Reactor was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and featured in The Los Angeles Times Book Review. The Door Open to the Fire received finalist honors for the Paterson Prize. Vollmer is recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and artist residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, the American Academy in Rome, Blue Mountain Center, and the Centrum Foundation, among others.

CAREY SOLERNO serves as the executive director & publisher of Alice James Books where she has been dedicated to broadening the spectrum of the American poetic voice since 2008. She is the author of The Hungriest Stars (2025), Tributary (2021), Shelter (2009), and a co-editor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books (2013). She is the recipient of a 2025 Pushcart Prize and a 2025 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Council. Salerno serves as co-chair for LitNet: The Literary Network and teaches publishing arts and poetry writing for the University of Maine.

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