HONORING THE LEGACY OF IRENE ADLER at Books Inc. Palo Alto

Bone Flute: A Woman Speaks, a posthumous reading honoring the legacy of local poet Irene Adler.
Featuring Angela Narciso Torres with Nan Cohen, Robin Ekiss, Peter Kline, and Cintia Santana.

Inspired by Bishop and Dickinson, Bone Flute: A Woman Speaks by Irene Adler gives equal voice to the unspeakable sorrows and wonders of being alive. Edited by award-winning poet Angela Narciso Torres, this posthumous collection provides a longitudinal poetic record of American life and womanhood echoing Linda Pastan, Mona Van Duyn, and Grace Paley.

“Reading Bone Flute, we travel with the poet through the seasons of her life, moving through history, through memory, through geography, and yet with a powerful sense of immediacy. I feel certain that there are poems here . . . that will survive the way poems do, lodged like a tough plant in a crack in someone’s heart.” —from the foreword by Nan Cohen, author of Unfinished City

“. . . Adler celebrates the small but profound joys that make any life a miracle in spite of suffering, ‘black clouds fringed silver.’” —Sally Ashton, author of Listening to Mars

“Smooth seeming are the waters into which Irene Adler’s words cleanly dive.” —Cintia Santana, author of The Disordered Alphabet

“Irene’s small and sacred meditations reveal what the owls, birds, and beetles already know: life’s ‘wild velocity’ lives in every ‘quill, bone, and feather.’” —Robin Ekiss, author of The Mansion of Happiness

“Bone Flute is a wise testament to the pain and wonder of being human.” —Peter Kline, author of Mirrorforms

Irene Adler was a poet and English teacher in Palo Alto, California where she was also a co-owner of the company that invented the Aerobie flying ring and the Aeropress coffee maker. By the time of her death in October 2023, she had written over 2,000 poems spanning 25 years.

Also check out other Arts events in Palo Alto, Literary Art events in Palo Alto.