Please join us for a reading by LeeAnn Pickrell from her new book, GATHERING THE PIECES OF DAYS, and, a reading by Cathryn Shea from her new book, GHOST MATINEE, hosted by Book Passage for this event organized by the Left Coast Writers.

Saturday June 14th, 2025 — 2PM

Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera ||

Gathering the Pieces of Days is a collection of 52 poems—one for each week of the year—born
from a daily ritual begun by LeeAnn Pickrell in 2018. Committing to a page each morning about the previous day, she captured life’s details in real-time, later condensing each week into a page of reflections. The following year, Pickrell transformed these 52 weeks of thoughts into poetry, blending free verse, prose poetry, contrapuntals, and list poems. This book emerged as a year of life expressed through poetry—messy, frustrating, joyful, and bittersweet.

In these poems, no subject is too small or too grand. Pickrell reminds us to savor everything: the morning coffee, a baseball game, the warmth of a loved one beside us, a cat curled at the foot of the bed, dreaded work, and cherished moments with friends. Her poems span mundane moments and profound emotions, inviting us to notice each fleeting day. Gathering the Pieces of Days celebrates the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary, from laughter and love to loss and longing, and the dreams that carry us forward.

Have you ever gotten to the end of your week feeling like the journey there was momentous, yet,
when asked what happened, had a hard time explaining? Pickrell, undeterred, forges through a
whole year of days with a voice that is disarmingly straightforward, modest in its approach and
scope, yet generous and often startling. Coffee, baseball, work, walks, naps, irritations,
revelations, moments of grace and gracelessness….  Aggregation is underrated, and Pickrell
knows exactly how to wield this power, by just being willing to see and hold everything, the ugly
and the gorgeous, the unimportant or unassuming. She shows us chosen moments like beach
rocks: ones we might not have picked up ourselves, yet each one revealing how time shapes us.

—Nina Lindsay, author of Because and Today’s Special Dish

“What are days for?” asks Philip Larkin in one of his most memorable poems. The answer is,
simply, that they are for living, the gift we are given, over and over, from the day we are born, to
make of what we can. In Gathering the Pieces of Days: A Year in Poetry, LeeAnn Pickrell’s
debut collection, days are for working, playing, mourning, loving, and finding poetry in ordinary
life. Beginning with journal entries written over the space of one year, Pickrell revised her work
into fifty-two poems for each week of 2018. The result is the chronicle of a life filled with the
mundane and the sublime, small triumphs and inevitable failures, beauty and sorrow and sudden
joy, and most of all, making art from the gift of days.

—Carolyn Miller, author of Route 66 and Its Sorrows

The 17th century Japanese poet Bashō famously told his students: “To learn about the pine tree, go
to pine trees, to learn from the bamboo, study the bamboo.” Four centuries later, LeeAnn Pickrell
has written a collection of spare elegant poems that, like the haiku master’s, celebrate the beauty
and sacred beingness of ordinary life. In tracking our shifting perception of reality, Gathering the
Pieces of Days unfolds as a litany of non-events that reveal the preciousness of the mundane.
Whether noting the sensual delight of a sushi roll or Danish jazz, the author casts a spell not
unlike the experience of chanting a familiar word until it lifts us into mystery. If attention is love,
as some say, this is a book of love poems to life.

—Dale M. Kushner, author of The Conditions of Love and M

LeeAnn Pickrell’s debut collection, Gathering the Pieces of Days, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in April 2025. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print journals, including One Art, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Loud Coffee Press, Atlanta Review, West Marin Review, Eclectica, where she was a Spotlight Poet, and the anthologies Coffee Poems and The Gathering of Finches. A poem from her book, “May 1,” received honorable mention in The Prose Poem contest. Her chapbook Punctuated was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press, and her book Tsunami is forthcoming in 2026, also from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Richmond, California, and has worked as an editor for over thirty years. She has an MFA from Mills College. On Substack, she writes LeeAnn’s Punctuated Poetry (leeannpickrell.substack.com).

In Ghost Matinee, Cathryn Shea’s second full-length poetry collection, she delves into the
haunting influence of memories that shape both the present and the future. Her poems weave together the personal, political, and global, revealing the hidden and overlooked amid the ordinary. With a keen eye on the fleeting beauty of our world, Shea offers a profound meditation on time—where “the past is a frontier” of uncharted memories, and “the future is a sanctuary” of hope and refuge. Rather than yearning for “the good old days,” these poems look forward, even as the ghosts of the past cast shadows over the matinees of our lives. Ghost Matinee presents a deeply reflective exploration of how we carry the past while seeking solace and possibility in what lies ahead.

Compelling, elegant, and linguistically dynamic, Ghost Matinee is filled with poems that perfectly balance emotion and intellect, painting intimate portraits of identity, loss, family, and nature. Shea showcases a true talent for imbuing small human details with authenticity and layered meanings. Each poem maps out the human heart in relation to that larger earth heart, in all their internal conflicts, with precision and grace.

—John Sibley Williams, author of The Drowning House

Cathryn Shea’s second full-length poetry book is Ghost Matinee (Unsolicited Press, April 2025). Her first full-length poetry book Genealogy Lesson for the Laity, is also available from Unsolicited Press of Portland, Oregon, and on Amazon. Cathryn’s newest chapbook is “Did Eve (Did) (dancing girl press, 2025). Cathryn’s poetry has been widely featured in numerous publications and was nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net. Her fourth chapbook, Backpack Full of Leaves, was published by Cyberwit.net in 2019, and her third, The Secrets Hidden in a Pear Tree, was released by dancing girl press the same year. She also published It’s Raining Lullabies with dancing girl press in 2017. Her earlier works include her first chapbook, Snap Bean (CC. Marimbo, 2014). Cathryn was a 2017 Best of the Net nominee and a merit finalist in the 2013 Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition. In 2004, she received the Marjorie J. Wilson Award, judged by Charles Simic. Her poetry is featured in many anthologies, including most recently Thin Places and Sacred Spaces by Amethyst Review.