Sara Ries, Come In, We're Open

Talking Leaves…Books on Main Street will host a poetry reading and book signing with area native Sara Ries. Ms. Ries’ collection, Come In, We’re Open, just published, was the winner of the 2009 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the reading, as they already are at both Talking Leaves locations. The reading and book signing is free and open to the public.

The poems in Come In, We’re Open are centered around a diner in a working-class Buffalo-area neighborhood and are full of vividly evoked characters—those of the speaker’s parents, who own the diner, and of the regulars who patronize it. Since Ries was two years old, her parents have owned the Woodlawn Diner in Blasdell, NY, where she now hosts Dinner and Poetry Nights. She has waitressed there and in other diners.

Ries’ manuscript was chosen from among 184 submissions from all over the U.S. and abroad, by Judge Ralph Burns, a much-published poet and esteemed poetry editor. He had this to say about his choice:

This collection demands that we value differently what seems quotidian, remain curious, suspend disbelief a few moments longer . . . . These are some stacked high pancakes, and some sweet songs from ‘a coffee spiller waitress. . . in the cadence/of plate scrapes to relieve swollen feet.’

Poet Jim Daniel’s also singled out this book for high praise:

Sara Ries invites us into the complex, intimate world of a small diner with such authority that I can almost hear a bell ring above the door with each new poem. She writes with a complete lack of pretense, with a straightforward, authoritative voice that reveals the truth in the small daily details and exchanges of the diner. This fine debut collection illustrates how a place and its people stay with you, become part of you, no matter how far away you may be.

Sara Ries, raised in Blasdell at the Woodlawn Diner, her family’s business, earned an MFA from Chatham University in Pittsburgh—her manuscript was rewarded Best Thesis in Poetry when she earned her degree. She currently hosts Dinner and Poetry nights at the diner, and is active in the Buffalo poetry community.