Book Launch – “Empire” by James Armstrong

Friday | September 22 | 5-7 pm
Minnesota Marine Art Museum | 800 Riverview Dr.
MMAM Event Page

James Armstrong, who served as Winona’s first Poet Laureate, will read from his latest book of poems, “Empire,” on September 22nd from 5 to 7 pm at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum. The launch event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be available from 5-5:30, followed by readings from “Empire,” and a question and answer period.

Armstrong, who retired last spring from Winona State University’s English Department, where he taught poetry and creative writing for 24 years, was named Winona’s first Poet Laureate in 2004. During that time he worked to bring poetry to local schools and organizations. One of his lasting contributions has been the founding of the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, a project which began as a local venture with the Great River Shakespeare Company and has grown into an international contest with entries from all around the world. Armstrong is the author of two previous poetry collections, “Monument in a Summer Hat” (New Issues Press) and “Blue Lash” (Milkweed Editions). Poems from his term as Poet Laureate are included in the anthology “Crossings: An Anthology of the Poets Laureate of Winona, Minnesota,” also published by Shipwreckt Books Publishing Company.

The book has received advance praise from his peers: Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kimberly Blaeser writes that “Empire” “lays bare truths of our oldest plagues—human greed and settler colonialism. In an America where ‘television is our forever’ and ‘this night is as dark as it is going to get,’ ‘sorrow is a door that keeps opening.’” Still, she says, there are “poems of beauty and brash love for the planet’s smallest gifts.” She cites deft examples of Armstrong’s phrasing: “the moon a half-spent coin,” “sun gauzy in a chemise of fine particles,” “wet vowels of the sea.”

Albert Goldbarth, two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and author of nearly 40 books, agrees that Armstrong’s poems demonstrate the ability to be “photographically exact and wildly imaginative at once,” and praises his “ability to compact large-scale ideas” in deft phrases, adding “These are tomorrow’s adages in the making.”

Michael Kleber-Diggs, author of “Worldly Things” and winner of Milkweed’s Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, writes that “’Empire’ is expertly crafted by a skilled and brilliant hand. James Armstrong sees the current and historical landscape fully and well, the natural climate and the national one.”

Melissa Range, 2015 National Poetry Series winner, also points out Armstrong’s formal abilities, writing that “‘Empire’ is a marvel of precision and craft from start to finish. Armstrong intuitively understands the argumentative energies of the sonnet form, and it is here, in a series of dazzling sonnets both rhymed and unrhymed, that his critiques are most pointed and most powerful.”

James Armstrong, Shipwreckt Books Publishing Company, and the Minnesota Marine Art Museum are members of the River Arts Alliance. To learn more about the benefits of membership, please visit: https://riverartsalliance.org/membership/.