Poetry Night with Local Author: Lee Kisling

Join us as we welcome local resident and author Lee Kisling. Lee will be reading from his new book,

Lemon Bars of Parnassus

With an eye trained on the curious, often quixotic details of a world in which “the only gods left are bandaged and wear glasses / because the old gods are all locked behind / the Lemon Bars of Parnassus” Lee
Kisling shows us lives lived after the bad choices, the accidents and
catastrophes. Sorrow and comedy make comfortable companions in poems
that wonder where picnic rain comes from and how the moon can “make magnets of hands and lips / when the world / is so full of care?” This is not a world of conventional beauty, but one where stars “sparkle with irony”
and the telltale signs of a town’s ordinary human tragedies are
witnessed by owls.  Taken as a whole, this collection invokes a
certain disquiet but also the unmistakable majesty of the human journey.

Lee Kisling, an Iowa native, is an engineer, writer, husband, and
father of two who has lived in Hudson, Wisconsin for twenty-five years.
In 1992, his first juvenile fiction novel, The Fools’ War,
was published by Harper Collins. He has written many songs and poems,
plays the piano, and in 2008 had a series of cartoons published in the
Wisconsin poetry journal, Free Verse. The poems in this
collection are from 2006–2010. He is currently enrolled in the Creative
Writing Department at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.