JAMES P. LENFESTEY

Tuesday, December 5, 7pm,
Plymouth Congregational Church
1900 Nicollet Avenue South, Minneapolis
This event is FREE and open to the public!

We are pleased to co-sponsor the publication reading of James P. Lenfestey’s A Marriage Book: 50 Years of Poems from a Marriage (Milkweed Editions). This special event will feature an Introduction by Milkweed editor Daniel Slager and a post-reading reception catered by author-chef Beth Dooley!

Writing love poems fifty years into a marriage is no easy task: “If he exaggerates his love, she’ll know . . . And if his desire for her is undiminished, / who would believe?” But in A Marriage Book, Lenfestey meets his own challenge with aplomb. These poems drop readers into the rich, textured world of one couple’s enduring intimacy, from the warmth of a bedroom occupied by two to squabbles over miscommunications and crumbs in the kitchen. A Marriage Book is a collection that essences the magic from the household quotidian, creating a technicolor portrait of a vibrant and dynamic family.

A Literary Witnesses event, co-sponsored by Rain Taxi Review of Books, Milkweed Editions, and the Loft Literary Center.

What people are saying about A Marriage Book:

“Warning Label: prepare to be shaken, moved, amused, terrified, relieved, delighted. Take in small doses or one large gulp; either way, you will be healed. These poems are alive with many things—stories, images, metaphors—but more than anything else they are alive with rhythm. These are poems of mutual passion, but also of heartbreak and solitude. In the final stanza of ‘My Wife Sleeping as I Drive,’ James P. Lenfestey writes: ’We plunge along our course of earth, / each alert in our own way, / ahead the blue black sky full /of oncoming lights and stars. How amazing that we have been invited along for the ride!’”
—Jim Moore

“Think of James P. Lenfestey’s A Marriage Book as a talking photo album or an unfolding epithalamium. The lovers meet and marry; the children arrive and grow up. Along the way, there are days of joy and anxious nights, sweetness and humor. The narrator is a courageous ‘captain,’ an ‘old shepherd / exhausted with tending,’ and a ‘Marco Polo,’ but like his predecessors, he always returns to his center, his wife, who is (as he says) his life. What a fine tribute to fifty years of real-world love!”
—Joyce Sutphen

“I’ve been an avid reader of James P. Lenfestey’s work for many years. His Seeking the Cave was a wonder. And so is his Marriage Book, a collection rooted in passion, desire, sensuality, and the ‘shared heat’ of love. This is above all a book of transcendence, of celebration. Containing a wealth of extraordinary poems, it appears to have been conceived in a beautiful sustained burst of illumination, Lenfestey overlapping his themes to create a collection so seamless it could well be read as one long poem. This is a truly superb book, an absolute joy to read.”
—Robert Hedin

“These tender, sly, plainspoken poems are a profound (and sexy) hymn to a long marriage. James Lenfestey writes of domestic matters, yes, but the poems are most definitely undomesticated. They tell a thousand small secrets in an extended meditation on love and all its consequences. They also chart the history of a complex emotion over many years, which I found fascinating. Tonally nuanced, fresh and far-ranging, the voice in these poems is a delight.”
—Chase Twichell