Gossamer Days: The Poetics of Thoreau’s Last Seasons

Join author Kristen Case for a reading and conversation drawn from her new book, Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar (Milkweed Editions), an exploration of Thoreau’s final work. Focusing on the chapter “Gossamer Days,” Case reflects on Thoreau’s return to his seasonal charts in the final months of his life, when illness confined him to his house on Main Street. Drawing on the journals, weather observations, river measurements, and natural phenomena he had painstakingly recorded for over a decade, Thoreau constructed a new kind of relationship to the living world—one sustained by memory, pattern, and reflection. Case traces how October’s gossamer threads—visible only in slant sunlight—became for Thoreau metaphors of interconnectedness, resilience, and the strange abundance of the year’s turning.

Kristen Case is a poet and scholar. In addition to Thoreau’s Kalendar, she is the author of American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe and three books of poetry, most recently, Daphne. She lives in Maine.

   This program is co-sponsored by the Concord Free Public Library and presented as part of the Concord Festival of Authors.