Join Jules and John reading their poems - new work and from their collections, at the Placitas Community Library.

Free - books for sale - a portion of book proceeds will benefit the library.

Light refreshments.

Jules Nyquist’s Atomic Paradise

2021 NM/AZ Book Award WINNER.

"I've dug in hard on ATOMIC PARADISE.  It's a fantastic send-up on what I'd call part of the essence of New Mexico.

Indeed, I have spent countless hours in Southwest churches both on and off my knees, both crying and praying and asking for signs, and remembering that I know so little, really nothing. And then, eventually, that "Flash of sunrise/40,000 tons of TNT..." that is figurative, but now, through your book, I see it also as literal, or some vestige of "the blast." Perhaps, too, it remains subtle as "white yucca flows/irreversible time/at Trinity."

In the end, ATOMIC PARADISE succeeds because one learns and digests the fact that the bomb exploded and still explodes on both a national, personal, regional, and spiritual level. In New Mexico, it's only brighter and more intense because it is the source.

— Lawrence Welsh, author of Begging for Vultures: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2009

Jules Nyquist lives in Placitas, New Mexico where she is the  founder of Jules’ Poetry Playhouse. Her recent award-winning books are Atomic Paradise, Homesick, The Sestina Playbook, Behind the Volcanoes, and Appetites. She took her PhD in Post-Secondary Adult Education from Capella University and her MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. Jules poems have been featured in print, online, audio, radio or in-person at various readings and events including the NM History Conference, in Las Cruces, NM,  the American Psychological Association Conference in Denver, CO, the Jonquil Motel in Bisbee, AZ, the Rattlesnake Museum in Albuquerque, NM, a kind of a small array gallery in Magdalena, NM, the Briar in Minneapolis, MN, the Black Dog Café in St. Paul, MN, a Masonic Lodge in Bemidji, MN, the New Mexico Humanities Council, in Albuquerque, NM, Unquarked in Los Alamos, NM, and featured at the International Women’s Day at the Santa Fe Capitol Rotunda, and many other bookstores, bars, galleries, and the Placitas Community Library. Her poems have appeared in Salamander, 5AM, Malpais Review, Adobe Walls, A View from the Loft, St. Paul Almanac, Long Islander News, Gray Sparrow, House Organ, Duke City Fix, Café Review IKON Magazine, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Taos Journal of Poetry, Southwestern Aubades and Nocturnes, Oddball Magazine, and elsewhere. Forthcoming work in A Year of New Mexico Poetry (the Anthology), Casa Urraca Press.

Author photo: Auxaarczen Photography

John Roche: Tubbables

An abracadabra of argle-bargles. A dictionary of deamflums. A guide book of gallilmaufries. A trilogy of taradiddles. What it definitely isn’t is an unreadable hurkle-durkle of caterwauling crinkum-crankums. Roche’s poems do and say what poetry has mostly forgotten and decided not to do and say in the recent past. They speak to us from viewpoints we can and will all enjoy, remember and revisit. Poems from and for all ages from thens to nows to always. To parapraise the closing words of this unbafflegabbing book of brawnesses, you’ll definitely want to pour another few cups of poetic joe.

— Stuart A. Paterson, Recent BBC Scotland Poet-in-Residence

John Roche lives in Placitas, New Mexico, helping Jules Nyquist run Jules’ Poetry Playhouse and edit Poetry Playhouse Publications. His latest poetry collection is Tubbables, which is a NM-AZ Book Award Finalist. Other books include On Conesus, Topicalities, Road Ghosts, The Joe Poems: The Continuing Saga of Joe the Poet, and Joe Rides Again: Further Adventures of Joe the Poet.  He has also created and edited the five-volume Poets Speak series  (Trumped, Hers, Water, Walls and Survival) and other anthologies (including Mo' Joe). Dr. Roche taught Literature and Creative Writing classes for decades at various colleges and teaches at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse and has done workshops for the New Mexico State Poetry Society. He was formerly President of Just Poets in Rochester, NY, a member of the board of BOA Editions, chief organizer of the Black Mountain North Symposium, and an instigator of the annual Cloudburst Council poets' retreat in the Finger Lakes.

Author photo Auxarczen Photography