Two Bainbridge-based poets will read at Eagle Harbor Book Company at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 7.

Michelle Bombardier will present her new book, “What We Do,” and David Stallings will read from his new book, “Risking Delight.”

This event is free and open to the public.

Bombardier is a Northwest poet whose work has appeared in many literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry International Online, Bellevue Literary Review, Floating Bridge, Artemis, The Examined Life Journal and others.

In this, her first collection, Bombardier considers faith, illness, death, and above all, human connection. With humor and compassion she shows us her own family, but also patients, students, strangers. “What We Do” is a call to empathy, an invitation to listen for what lies underneath. The people inhabiting these poems come to life through such rich, loving detail they all sound like family.

At its center, “What We Do” is about survival, how quickly things can fall apart, and what it means to live in the aftermath of loss. Resilient and brave, the sonnet cycle in this collection does what poetry is meant to do, shake us into awareness of ourselves and of those around us, whether family or stranger, the rhythms and forms working against grief and pain.

According to author Jenifer Browne, “In David Stallings’s ‘Risking Delight,’ the poet confesses, ‘I do not know if I am supposed to be here,’ a contemplation that infiltrates the spare, intimate poems in this collection. Guided by water, by breath, by dog, child, or Buddha, the poems reveal ‘those dragons who fought to a stalemate above this place and now grieve alone in wintry caves.’

“The speaker meditates on birth and death, love, and loss, through a lens of passionate observation. Stallings’s poems offer the reader ‘plenty of good fortune, like this small, unplanned loft where you and I will sleep.’

“Traveling from Boulder Creek to the Yukon River, ‘where winding trail and stream often merge,’ expect to delight in this journey of rivers, from the center of ‘the lily’s… tiny green planets’ to the spiritual borderlands the poet inhabits.”

Visit www.eagleharborbooks.com to learn more.