Join Mark Halperin as he reads excerpts from his poetry books FALLING THROUGH THE MUSIC and CHANGING WEATHER Friday April 13th 5:30 - 7:30pm. Special guest musician Sam Albright will perform between readings and light refreshments will be provided.

MARK HALPERIN taught at Central Washington University and has taught in Japan, Estonia, Russia, and Ukraine. His poetry books have been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Wesleyan University Press, and Copper Canyon Press. His poems and translations have appeared in a variety of journals. Halperin lives outside of Ellensburg, Washington, near the Yakima River.

“Falling Through the Music is a book about high middle age when entropy, mortality, and overall decline cease to be rumor and feel more or less like the beginning of something that, for all its fear and sadness, promises to be fundamentally interesting. The poems range from the personal and familial across cultures and across other boundaries into the affirmations of art. This is the place where the artistic impulse does not save one from falling through music into death and nothingness, but somehow the companionship of art seems to be the best counterbalance to the terrors. Halperin deftly conjoins the mortal fears of advancing age with fears that one inherits through family and history, with the fear that there is really nothing stable or salvific in the world unless it is what we create. And therein resides the greater pleasure of this book - the sense that what is created is all we have and must be treasured for that. In short, this is a book of considerable emotional sophistication and impact.”- Frederick Marchant, Suffolk University