FARMINGTON — A poetry reading will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 25, at Farmington Public Library. All are invited.

Lee Sharkey and Christian Barter will each read from their new books.

Sharky’s new collection, “Calendars of Fire,” is her fourth full-length poetry collection. Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Drunken Boat, Field, Kenyon Review, Nimrod, The Pinch, Seattle Review. 

Sharky was the Maine Arts Commission’s 2010 Fellow in Literary Arts and was also the recipient of a Rainmaker Award in Poetry. After many years of teaching English and women’s studies at UMF, she now devotes her time to editing the Beloit Poetry Journal, writing and teaching a writing workshop for psychiatrically labeled adults.

An extended elegy whose grief is political as well as personal, “Calendars of Fire” inscribes landscapes where those divided from us by national or tribal border, barrier wall or death are all in actuality the beloved.

The poet Fred Marchant writes, “When you finish reading ‘Calendars of Fire’ the first time, you will want to go right back to the beginning and start reading it again, and again, and each time it will renew itself in its own flames.”

Barter’s new poetry collection is “In Someone Else’s House.” His poetry has appeared in journals including Ploughshares, The Literary Review, Epoch, Georgia Review and Poetry Daily and has been read on The Writer’s Almanac. He has been a resident fellow at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony and a Hodder Fellow in poetry at Princeton. He works as a trail crew supervisor at Acadia National Park and is on the editorial board of the Beloit Poetry Journal.

“In Someone Else’s House” is a collection of lyrics and monologues, often both at once, that explore our various states of impermanence. “Happiness and despair, regret and affirmation, loss and wisdom continually morph, one into the other,” is how former Maine Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl describes these poems.