Woodstock, Connecticut author Karen Warinsky will launch her new book of poetry at Booklovers’ Gourmet, 72 E. Main Street, Webster on Saturday, June 28 from 1-2:30 p.m.  This event is free and open to the public and will include a limited open mic and raffle.

 Titled Beauty & Ashes, (Kelsay Press), this is her fourth collection. Warinsky has published poetry since 2011 and her books are Gold in Autumn (2020) and Sunrise Ruby (2022), both from Human Error Publishing, and Dining with War  (2023 Alien Buddha Press).” She is a Best of the Net nominee and a former finalist of the Montreal International Poetry Contest and won First Place in 2024 for her poem “Mirage” from the Ekphrastic Poetry Trust.  She coordinates spoken word/poetry events in MA and CT under the name Poets at Large, and currently holds readings at Roseland Park in Woodstock and The Vanilla Bean Café in Pomfret, CT.  Warinsky and her husband have lived in Woodstock for 34 years where they raised their three children, and she is retired from careers in journalism and teaching. 

Lee Desrosiers, editor and publisher of The Naugatuck River Review and Wordpeace, wrote in her blurb for the book:   “In these poems you will find a celebration of womanhood and self-love, a carillon, meditations on aging and mortality, gardens and lakes, marriage, a folder for death, junkmen “with their scrappy junkyard no-name cat / and their watchful, blank blue-eyed German Shepherd,” and much more, which together make Warinsky’s collection well worth reading.”

James Penha, managing editor for The New Verse News, writes: Beauty & Ashes … follows the seasons of the year as an allegory, of course, for the trajectory of a human life. But the book’s calendar ends in spring, the season of beginnings (!) despite our learning earlier from a speaker that Death “is sometimes there / lounging in my poems about nature and spirit… / he wants to take me home.” And so, I reread these poems earnestly wondering where we have been and where we are headed. And I do mean we, for although the poems are personal and autobiographical, I recognize in all of them a correspondence and often a congruence with my own experience of beauty and ashes. I think every reader of this collection will as well.

This event is suitable for ages 14 and up.  Books will be available for purchase.  People should call (508) 949-6232 to sign up for the open mic.