Join us for a reading with Lea Marshall, who will read from her debut poetry collection, The Slow Hammer of Roots. An audience Q&A will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: In Lea Marshall’s visionary debut collection, The Slow Hammer of Roots, poems gently suspend the reader in Time, actively and avidly dissecting past, present, and future with grace and wonder. Marshall’s deep-sweeping journey reaches back to the beginning of grass, explores Lee’s surrender at Appomattox where her fourth-great grandfather was aide de camp, follows a series of future folktales, and even hypothesizes Totality. Roots weave themselves “through concrete, their own heart— / the deathly intertwining of desire / and waste.” These roots, both healthy and strangling, bond Marshall to the immediate family she knows and to slaveholding ancestors she is just discovering. She asks, “Do we light // a fire now that glimmers down the loop / of time until it reaches each of them?” Marshall illuminates truths over many years covered and recovered with vivid and vast imagery, a perfectly constant state of lost and found. The moon’s bright light can disrupt the world and comprehension, yet the “heart will lift a little, like the grass.”
About the Author: Lea Marshall’s writing has appeared in Imagining: A Gibney Journal, The Atlantic, Dance Magazine, and elsewhere, and her poetry has been published in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology, Hayden’s Ferry Review, JAMA, Diode, and Rogue Agent, among other journals and anthologies. She worked as a producer and arts administrator for over twenty years, earning her MFA along the way from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her debut collection, The Slow Hammer of Roots, was published in 2025 by Broadstone Books. Lea currently works as a grant writer and lives with her family in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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