The Writer’s Center welcomes poet Richard Smith for a reading from his new collection, Beyond Where Words Can Go. This reading will be followed by a Q&A and signing.
About the Book
Beyond Where Words Can Go traces a group of Tudor-era Benedictine monks before, during, and after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and England’s zigzag into Protestantism. What happens when a top-down authority dictates changes in a faith’s doctrines and rituals and even the language in which it’s understood? How do you reconcile devotion to God with love for another man? Where’s home when the place you’ve lived for decades is destroyed not only as an institution but also as a physical structure? It takes creativity and profound fellow-feeling for these “odd and precious” men to chart a path forward.
Richard Smith’s first book, Not a Soul but Us, is a narrative in sonnets about the plague pandemic in mid-14th-century England. It won the 2021 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and was released in 2022 by Bauhan Publishing. His second book, Beyond Where Words Can Go: A Novel in 200 Sonnets, also from Bauhan, will be published in April 2026. Richard is a psychologist with a clinical practice in Washington, D.C.
Stephen Holland (Moderator) is a clinical psychologist. He is former Director of Capital Institute for Cognitive Therapy and author of a widely used text on empirically supported treatments for depression and anxiety. He has known Richard for more than 25 years and had the privilege of reading these poems as they were being written.
FREE & open to the public. RSVP.