Free Event: Poetry Reading With Susan Vespoli

Join us for a free reading with Susan Vespoli. Susan will be reading from her recently published poetry collection Therefore, Illuminated (Kelsay Books, 2025). The reading will include a generative writing session, and conclude with a Q&A. 

Therefore, Illuminated is a memoir-in-verse by Susan Vespoli timelining her path back toward light following the aftermath of her son Adam’s 2022 murder by the Phoenix Police. (Note: it is a sort of sequel to her previous collection One of Them Was Mine.) One of the opening quotes in Therefore, Illuminated is Leonard Cohen’s iconic: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” The other was heard in a 12-Step meeting: “Have a good life anyway.” This is a book about having a good life anyway. The poems were formed from fodder that bubbled up during stream-of-consciousness writing circles and Wild Writing. Vespoli believes in the power of writing to heal.

Learn more about Therefore, Illuminated. and order your copy here: https://kelsaybooks.com/products/therefore-illuminated

We will meet on Wednesday, April 16th, from 7 PM to 8 PM US Eastern Time. 

This is a free event. Please RSVP here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/imsEzrfiRn24vHW8erI-1Q

Therefore, Illuminated is a fierce love poem of a book, the kind that can only be written by someone who has lost and struggled and faced betrayal after betrayal, injustice after injustice, and somehow still finds a way to show up and notice the throng of sunflowers outside the window. I want to cheer for the tenacity, the courage, the devotion it took to write these poems. I want to honor that somehow Susan Vespoli alchemized fury and fuckery into art. “You don’t get to choose love, it just happens,” she writes. Here we see humanity at its worst and also the determination, the grace it takes to “still believe good will prevail.” This book is a triumph.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of The Poetic Path

How do we confront the unimaginable, unbearable loss of a child? What does it mean to be the mother of an active addict? How do we live with grief when it is accompanied by systematic injustice & prejudice? And ultimately, when it comes, how do we let in what light breaks through? These are the important, agonizing questions explored with unflinching honesty in Susan Vespoli’s powerful, profound poetry collection Therefore, Illuminated. In the end, we come to understand that this collection is not only a curation of a mother’s grief, but of her survival. It is elegiac, yes, but it is ultimately a testament to the power of acceptance, surrender & the determination to carry on.
—Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter of Three, Gone Kingdoms, and Night Swim

Much poetry aspires to transcend the everyday–not the work of Susan Vespoli. Hers is a poetry incorrigibly committed to claiming and reclaiming a world at its most painfully quotidian, even and especially when that world has broken every promise. Therefore, Illuminated features speakers who forgo flimsy mercies and who, across forms and tones, renew themselves and us with bare-knuckled honesty and with a humor identifiable only as a sister to loss. This book lives where we live and breathes as we breathe.
—Joshua Davis, author of Reversal Spells in Blue and Black