Beth Ann Fennelly reading at Square Books

Beth Ann Fennelly takes the stage at Off Square Books Tuesday evening with her new book, Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. Some pieces are only a half-page long, none is longer than perhaps three pages, and, while this is not exactly poetry, the author, a poet, writes these mostly personal vignettes poetically, excising any narrative excess in order to get to the gist of memory and meaning, thus having the effect of poetry — very good poetry, that is — and causing the virtuosic novelist, Richard Ford, to confess, "I wish I'd written it." — RH