BY KAREN BOSSICK

Sun Valley poet Andy Kerstetter will read selections from his new collection, “The Inferno Lessons,” Thursday evening at The Community Library.

The poems tell of aging, illness and our relationship with nature and our own bodies.

Due to the threat of bad weather, the reading and conversation will be broadcast on the library’s Livestream at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 20. It also will be recorded for later viewing.

Kerstetter, a native of Pennsylvania, moved to the Mountain West shortly after earning a degree in writing from Geneva College and found his way to Ketchum in 2015. His poems have appeared in several journals.

Katty Wompus Press says that Kerstetter’s poems don’t let us off the hook or let us down easy. Take this excerpt from one of his poems “The Inferno Lessons:”

“Search teams are combing through the ashes in your mouth

Trying to find bathtubs or beds where people might have taken

The tongue, also a fire, which left no way to escape a world

Of evil among the parts of the body.”

One poem ponders “If God Made Adam From Snow.” Another, the travails of “Resting by a Stream on a Summer Hike:”

“On the other side

of this frothing mountain stream,

I see a stony shore burdened with weeping

willows where a pair of magpies roost,

vanishing beyond the boughs, wings

flashing blue. I take off my shoes,

hitch up my pants and step in, intent

to find out what the magpies know.”

But, alas, the water’s cold bite and sharp rocks join hands to freeze his efforts of exploration, Kerstetter continues.

Tune into Kerstetter’s reading at https://livestream.com/comlib