'Hurt Like a Mother' poetry reading

Poets Alise Alousi and Sarah Carson will visit East Lansing 4 p.m. Sunday (May 19) to present “Hurt Like a Mother,” a reading exploring “the complexities of motherhood or being mothered: the joy, the grief, the rage, the embarrassment, the love,” according to the Lansing Poetry Club.

The event is free to attend, though the poetry club will accept donations. Carson and Alousi’s reading will be followed by an open mic, where attendees are invited to share a poem of up to five minutes in length.

Alousi, an Iraqi American poet based in Detroit, was a 2019 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and has worked for Detroit’s InsideOut Literary Arts program for more than two decades. Her poetry collection, “What to Count,” is a finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in poetry. Elsewhere, her writing has been published in Verse Daily, the Mom Egg Review and in the anthology “We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage.”

Carson, a Michigan native who now lives in Chicago, has had poems, essays and short stories published in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, the Colorado Review, the Columbia Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Guernica, the Nashville Review and beyond. Her most recent poetry collection, “How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan,” was the winner of Persea Books' 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award.

For more information about the event, visit lansingpoetryclub.com or call Lansing Poetry Club President Ruelaine Stokes at (517) 881-7562.