Cori Winrock with Anne de Marcken — 'Alterations'

Third Place Books welcomes Bellingham poet and essayist Cori Winrock to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her new book, . Using both textiles and texts — from the first space suits to wedding gowns, from Emily Dickinson to Goodnight Moon — Alterations presents a meditation on mourning and how we bear, imagine, and accommodate loss. This event is free and open to the public.

For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

This event is free to attend. Registration is recommended in advance.

"In the city where I was born there is a collective of women taking apart donated wedding dresses. Seam ripping and taking off lace, uprooting stitches and unstringing beads—one by one by hand in their spare time."

A collective of women gathers to painstakingly turn wedding dresses into burial garments for infants. "Like many collectives whose existence and skills might seem unfathomable, most of us won't know about them until there is a need to know," writes Winrock. It is when confronted with the loss of her own unborn twin child that Winrock learns of their transformative work and begins to create a garment herself--made of language. Threading together stories of textiles and texts, from the first space suits and the seamstresses who made them, to Emily Dickinson's famous white dress, to the Steinian rhythms of Goodnight Moon, Winrock constructs and reconstructs an essay that might begin to accommodate devastating loss. A work of process and possibility, Alterations enacts the hidden labors of mourning.

Cori Winrock is a poet and multimedia essayist. Her book-length essay, Alterations, is part of the Undelivered Lecture series from Transit Books. Her previous book, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, was chosen as Editor’s Choice for the Alice James Book Award. She is the winner of the Boston Review Poetry Prize and her essay on twins was selected as a notable essay in Best American Essays. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, POETRY, the Best New Poets anthology, Bennington Review, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of Interactive Poetics at Western Washington University.

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

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