Carol Townsend’s trilogy of poems
published in The Cafe Review, Winter 2024
* Ode To An Old Sweatshirt
The Old Sweatshirt Speaks
The Wife Admits All
* Listen to Carol’s reading of “Ode…” below:
Chautauqua Literary Arts Center
2023 Authors’ Hour Series
Hosted by the Friends of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, her reading is now available on the Friends of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center YouTube channel.
Buffalo Corner Reading Series
This Zoom event was recorded and may be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uog-FxII0oM.
Carol’s introduction and reading begins at the 8:30 mark.
LIT CITY CELEBRATION
Celebrate Buffalo’s literary community and the year-long Lit City: On the Move public art project with JBLC and the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library at this Lit City Celebration, featuring poetry readings, music performances by Daughters of Creative Sound, Little Cake, and Taylor Made Jazz, made-to-order poetry on typewriters, video screenings and more!
Featured readers—whose poetry has appeared on buses, bus shelters and at transit stations throughout Buffalo this year as part of Lit City: On the Move—include Ansie Baird, Theo Bellavia-Frank, Kim Chinquee, Allei Floyd, Jillian Hanesworth, Zanaya Hussain, Justin Karcher, Amanda Kelly, Raina Lipsitz, Rebekah S. Malone, Trinity Ridout, Sherry Robbins, Maria Scrivani, Irene Sipos, Annette Daniels Taylor, Carol Townsend, Julio Montalvo Valentín, Keira VanDerBeck, Janna Willoughby-Lohr and ryki zuckerman.
This event is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.
Carol Townsend’s poem, “Nest”
… was one of 50 selected for the public art project, “BUF LIT: On the Move”, sponsored by Just Buffalo Literary Center and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority. Poems appear on the sides of buses, at rail stations and at bus shelters throughout the city of Buffalo. Carol’s poem is up on a bus shelter at the corner of Genesee and Bailey.
Friends of the Chautauqua Writers Center
Recorded on July 15, 2021…
Authors’ Hour Series
sponsored by the Friends of the Chautauqua Writers Center
Carol reads selections from The Color of Shadows and perhaps a new poem or two. She is featured along with Craig Sipe, author of “Lovely Dregs” and editor of “The Cafe Review”
NOTE: Carol’s reading begins at about the midway point of the video. To go directly there, please fast forward to 26:50.
Carol Townsend’s Poetry Reading…
Recent Publications
Comments on The Color of Shadows
Carol Townsend’s The Color of Shadows is a marvel, a book that is at once playful and funny yet at the same time so deeply moving, engaged with central questions of love and death, loss and transformation. Music and art are everywhere in these poems, as is the natural world in all of its violence and beauty. In the poem “Among the Palms,” Townsend writes, “we cross-pollinate and grow / ourselves anew in shades of green, / a variegated garden.” The poems in this book are just such a garden, lush, vivid and dazzling.
—Nicole Cooley
Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award winner,
author of Of Marriage
With grace and humor, Carol Townsend delves into the nuanced space between the internal and physical world. While the poems of The Color of Shadows display wit and insight, it is Townsend’s attention—her deft listening—that most distinguishes the collection. Whether set at the Acropolis or a Home Improvement Store, the poems attend to the interstices between word and world. “Sitting at the feet of the universe,” Townsend channels a familiar, yet haunting song.
—Philip Brady, author of
To Banquet With the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet