When: Wednesday, October 4th at 1pm-3pm
Where: Highland Books, 36 W. Main Street, Brevard, NC 28712

Save the date and drop-in to meet Mary Ardery, purchase a copy of her latest book, and have it personally signed!

Based on her experience as a wilderness guide for women in a substance-abuse treatment program in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mary Ardery's debut collection, Level Watch, is a haunting look at relapse and recovery and the rough but potent solace of nature. These narrative-lyric poems chronicle a labor both physically and emotionally intense: bearing witness to campfire confessions, facing uphill climbs and frigid rivers and wildfires, reckoning with relapses and overdoses. Here is a clear-eyed vision of intoxication and recovery, the ways we share and manage pain, and how our personal histories can haunt us but also lead us down transformative paths. Firmly grounded in time and place, part record and part elegy, this is a book for those who have been affected by addiction and all who have ever sought solace or redemption in nature.

Mary Ardery's poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review online, RHINO, and elsewhere. Her prose and photography appear in publications such as The Sun, DIAGRAM, The Indianapolis Review, and The Cincinnati Review online. She earned a BA from DePauw University and an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. The recipient of a Lifelong Arts Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission, she was born and raised in Bloomington and now lives in West Lafayette, Indiana with her husband, son, and Boston Terrier named Bug.​

This drop-in event is FREE and open to the public.