Please join us in welcoming former Maine State Poet Laureate Baron Wormser back to Maine to read and talk about his two recent books, The History Hotel: Poems (CavanKerry, 2023) and a new edition of The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid (Brandeis University Press, 2023).
Tim Seibles writes, “The History Hotel carries a mixture of quiet humor and hard-nosed insight. There’s little decoration here, no fluff to deflect our attention from what we know that we know—just the energetic presence of Wormser’s consistently cool, keen sensibility that is both bewildered and wise.”
About The Road Washes Out in Spring, the Boston Globe notes, “All in all, this is the best book about rural New England life since Jane Brox's Here and Nowhere Else. Its scope is narrow, but its reach is vast. Its short but wide-ranging essays seem like the dozens of jars of canned tomatoes Wormser and his wife put up each year to provide the base of their winter meals, each one carefully, thoughtfully, and lovingly prepared…As such, the book asks to be read slowly, savored, because, as Wormser says of the entire enterprise of living off-grid, ‘There was no sum. Only infinite entries.’”
Baron Wormser lived in Maine for over twenty-five years and worked as a librarian for SAD 59 in Madison. He is the author of 20 books including most recently The History Hotel: Poems (CavanKerry, 2023) and a new edition of The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid, (Brandeis University Press, 2023). The latter recounts his experience living with his family in Mercer, in an off-the-grid house on forty-eight acres 1975 to 1998. In 2000 he was appointed as the second Poet Laureate of Maine by Governor Angus King and served in that capacity for six years and visited many libraries and schools throughout Maine. Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, New Hampshire, and continues to work in schools. Wormser lives with his wife, Janet, in Montpelier, Vermont.