Join us for an evening of celebration and poetry! Rock Canyon Poets returns to their original home at Pioneer Book in Provo to read from their 10th anniversary anthology Orogeny as part of Utah Humanities Book Festival. The 2025 Utah Humanities Book Festival marks 28 years of strengthening Utah communities through reading, literature, and conversations with authors and each other. Held during October’s National Book Month, the Book Festival offers virtual and in-person events. Click here for a full schedule of Utah Humanities Book Festival.
The special 10th anniversary collection of poems by the Rock Canyon Poets, with over 75 pages of poems by living poets. Orogeny is the seventh printed anthology by Rock Canyon Poets members and is currently available for $10 plus shipping if ordered online. Click here to order.
Praise for Orogeny: Volume 7
Arising in a particularly salty part of the Great American Desert, The Rock Canyon Poets look into the fundamental landscape to question accepted homogeneities, and find them crumbling rapidly. These poems observe and examine evolving scenes of love, family, and community in the crucible that is twenty-first century Utah, USA, and sees the world reimagined. The fact that this group of writers has lasted long enough to collaborate on a 7th anthology is a testament to the power of small diverse groups of humans who come together with the common urge – to write – and thus, find ways to move through the modern wilderness with increasing grace. Picking up the frayed pieces of their lives these poets collectively decide that, as one of the prime movers of the group, Trish Hopkinson, says, “When the garden grows poison, make pie.” —Danny Rosen, Lithic Press
In “Breadcrumbs,” one of the poems in this anthology, Stacy Julin writes, “A blue umbrella / from my aunt’s favorite drink, / a smooth purple rock / from the dirt / up the canyon. / My painted heart locket on a silver chain, / scattered through drawers, / boxes of our house.” To me, those lines are like a metaphor for this whole book. It isn’t just a box full of 49 poems. It’s more like a home—with a poem in a drawer here, a poem like a switched-on lamp over there, a hurt poem talking to her friend on the phone, another poem cooking in the kitchen, a poem that smells like tangerines, a poem in place of the TV news, poems turning and falling from November limbs or coloring the Wasatch Mountains out the window, all coming together like a note on the table to remind us what to remember. —Rob Carney, author of The Book of Drought
This well-sequenced volume carries us down a river of bright sensation: the poems are streaked with visual beauty, sensual grasp, tricky faith and saving disillusion. Violence and shelter. Along the way: birth, un-birth; naming, renaming. Intimate artifacts of death. Fallen peaches, wayward seedlings, and you’ll never stop seeing tangerines. Settle into your favorite reading place and savor the seventh Orogeny. Twice and again. Gorgeous. —Karin Anderson, author of What Falls Away and (forthcoming 2025) Things I Didn’t Do
Rock Canyon Poets boasts diverse membership, ranging from 19 to 70+ years in age with many backgrounds–including literary journal founders, editors, ex-military, business professionals, a playwright, and a periodontist. Individually, they have received several awards and been published in magazines, anthologies, journals, chapbooks, and full-length books of poetry. Rock Canyon Poets offer poetry with the tactile clarity of tin-can messages through fuzzy strings to the ears of an audience. These poems are tumbleweeds in semi-truck grills. They get stuck in your teeth, build bridges of spun sugar, and make it possible to mount a camel without a sturdy ladder.
Co-founded by Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen and Trish Hopkinson in 2015, Rock Canyon Poets was established to develop camaraderie among Utah Valley poets, provide consistent workshopping and reading opportunities, and promote the disciplined study of writing poetry as a serious art form. Members meet twice a month at Pioneer Book in historic downtown Provo. The group sponsors poetry readings and an open mic on the 2nd Tuesday of every month. Membership is by invitation or portfolio submission only.
For more information, contact the Rock Canyon Poets, rockcanyonpoets@gmail.com.
Rock Canyon Poets 