Poetry Reading with Jessica Purdy

Date:
Friday, November 8, 2024
Time:
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location:
The Rocks
113 Glessner Road
Bethlehem, NH 03561
United States
Join The Rocks for a Poetry Reading with Jessica Purdy, author of "The Adorable Knife: Poems after The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death"

Enjoy a reading of poems inspired by Frances Glessner Lee's Nutshell Studies by with New Hampshire author Jessica Purdy on Friday, November 8th at 7 PM.

In a review of these fictional poems in The Boston Globe, Nina MacLaughlin writes: "She speaks to our weaknesses, our failings, our rage, of limits pushed and clues left, confession, admission, denial, and all that's spoken in what's left unsaid. It's a collection of mysteries solved and unsolved, with the imperative echoing through all of it: 'Observe everything.'"

About the Author

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA from Emerson College. She is the author of STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate, 2017 and 2018), and The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), and You’re Never the Same (Seven Kitchens Press). Sleep in a Strange House was a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry. Her poetry manuscript Lung Hours was a finalist in Codhill Press' Guest Editor Poetry Series 2023, The Granite State Poetry Prize, and The Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize. Her poems and micro-fiction have been nominated for Best Spiritual Literature, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best Micro-Fiction. Her poetry, flash fiction, and reviews appear in About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, The Night Heron Barks, SoFloPoJo, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Exeter, New Hampshire and teaches Creative Writing at SNHU.

About Frances Glessner Lee

Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962), known as "the mother of forensic science," spent her childhood summers at The Rocks, where she lived full-time later in her adult life. Frances was passionate about furthering the field of forensic medicine and chose to endow Harvard with a Department of Legal Medicine. It was at The Rocks in the 1940s that she began to create a set of miniature models depicting highly accurate crime scenes, which she used as police training tools. Frances named her project the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after an old police saying to "convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell."