In celebration of National Poetry Month, three Portland poets — John Brehm, Andrea Hollander and Paulann Petersen — will give a reading from The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, edited by Brehm, and published by Wisdom Press.

The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy offers a wide-ranging collection of 129 ancient and modern poems unlike any other anthology on bookshelves today. It uniquely places Buddhist poets like Han Shan, Tu Fu, Saigyo, Ryokan, Basho, Issa and others alongside modern Western poets one would not expect to find in such a collection — poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Frank O’Hara, Denise Levertov, Yusef Komunyakaa, Billy Collins and more. What these poems have in common, no matter whether they are explicitly Buddhist, is that all reflect the essential truths the Buddha articulated 2,500 years ago.