Please join us on Friday, September 19, 2025 at 7:00 PM as we welcome poet Alison Luterman with her new poetry collection, Hard Listening. Alison will be joined by Leslie Absher in conversation. This event will be in person at Montclair Presbyterian Church, 5701 Thornhill Dr., Oakland, CA 94611.
We will be selling the book at the event, and you can pre-order a copy of Hard Listening at
https://ggpbooks.com/book/9781961741232.
Description
Hard Listening is a testament of hope, celebrating the fierce feminine in song and on the streets with odes to a pair of girls hanging out on a neighbor's porch, a naked woman in the locker room of the gym, a mother lifting the weight of her own pain off her child. Here, Alison Luterman weaves poems about singers, activists, and lovers of all stripes. The book recounts her journey to learn how to sing—missed notes, warbly vibrato and all. During the pandemic, she started taking voice lessons to sing and collaborate with her musician husband. She did not start out with a firm grasp of pitch or a great sense of rhythm, but had a lot of enthusiasm, a wonderful teacher, and a willingness to work hard. Learning to "speak music"—his primary language—was the key that opened them up to an unexpected depth of intimacy.
The process of learning to sing reminded her of all the singers she had idolized from a young age. She began to listen to those women again, this time attuning to their skill and what their real lives were like. It became clear to Alison that beyond the glamour lay a world of challenges and sometimes heartbreak that she had not fully reckoned with before. The poems she wrote in homage to these great women singers form the core of Hard Listening.
In the course of her investigation, the United States was tacking far right and her poems began to reflect these fraught politics. She found herself redefining her calling as a poet, writing to be in service to those fighting for democracy, kindness, decency and justice.
About Alison Luterman:
Alison Luterman's four books of poems prior to this one are The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly; Desire Zoo and In the Time of Great Fires. She has published poems in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Rattle, The Atlanta Review, Main Street Rag, and many other journals and anthologies. Two of her poems are included in Billy Collins' Poetry 180 project at the Library of Congress. Alison lives in Oakland. Read more about Alison and her work at this link: alisonluterman.net
About Leslie Absher:
Leslie is a journalist and a writer of true stories, personal essays, and memoir; this usually means disclosing things she's not “supposed to," whether it’s about growing up with a CIA dad, swimming with sharks in the San Francisco Bay, or facing cancer and how she chose to move with it instead of “fighting it.” She seeks to cultivate compassion and truth in all her writing.
Leslie's father joined the CIA before she was born, and shortly afterwards her family moved to Athens, Greece. Just in time for a coup. She has spent years trying to learn what her Cold War father’s role was in that event. And though she left when she was still a child, Greece is a place she returns to often. She moved around frequently after Athens until she landed in Boston for college. She received a master’s in education from Harvard and taught G.E.D. to high school dropouts. After years apart, she reconnected with her college flame, Susan, a writer and graphic novelist, and moved to Oakland.
Leslie is the author of the memoir, Spy Daughter, Queer Girl: In Search of Truth and Acceptance in a Family of Secrets. A regular contributor to Ms. magazine, her work has been featured in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Salon, and elsewhere. You can find her at leslieabsher.com.
Also check out other Arts events in Oakland, Literary Art events in Oakland, Music events in Oakland.
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