Booking and details
Dates & TicketsDates Tue, Apr 8, 2025 at 7:30pm
Venue Folger Theatre
Tickets $20
Duration 60 minutes
Please note: Children under the age of 4 are not permitted.
The 2024-25 Poetry season concludes with a finale reading by Ellen Bass. Bass’s most recent poetry books include Indigo, Like a Beggar, and The Human Line. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction works include The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. Bass, chosen by a group of Folger Poetry supporters, will read from the work of other poets cited as a literary influence, as well as from her own work. A bookselling and signing will follow the reading in the Folger’s Great Hall.
Can’t join us in person? Purchase virtual access to a live streaming of the reading. Purchase now
About the poet
Selected works
When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away—
relocated they call it—
their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming.
Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart,
twisted knot, hot blood rivering
to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet.
Just weeks before
I watched a bear and her cubs run down a mountain
in the twilight.
So buoyant, they seemed to be tumbling
to the meadow,
to the yarrow root they dug, rocking
to wrest it from the hard ground, fattening for winter.
They were breathing what looked like gladness.
But that other mother . . .
Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent.
Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.
