To honor the Sargentville Library theme of “Legacy & Lore,” local poet Beatrix Gates will talk about her ongoing progression as a poet-revealing community histories & praising mentors by reading new work and poems from “The Burning Key.”

From Dana Delibovi: “Haunting, smoldering love colors every page of…the poet’s new and selected poems, spanning 50 years of glorious work. Gates, well known as an activist poet, refers clearly to LGBTQ+, feminist, and anti-war activism.” Praise from California Poet Laureate, Lee Herrick: “This a precise, unsentimental, fully engaged poetics: women’s friendships, a deep knowing, praise. The Burning Key feels like a life or several lives or a museum of language. Expansive, captivating, stellar.”

We look forward to Beatrix Gates’ interpretation of “Legacy & Lore” as a meditation on hope as resistance and a testament to the communities and legacies that sustain intimate relationships and intergenerational social movements.

Beatrix Gates’ The Burning Key, New & Selected Poems (1973-2023), Thera Books, includes poems from seven collections, award-winning translations & uncollected poems. A MacDowell and Ucross fellow; NEA recipient as librettist for the opera, “The Singing Bridge”; Maine Arts Commission Poetry Awardee and Finalist for MWPA Nonfiction chapbook, judged by Melissa Febos, she has had significant time in San Francisco and NYC with roots in Down East Maine. She is working on hybrid about lgbtq life in Maine from 1975 on. beatrixgates.org.