Last Saturday, Susquehanna’s FUSE chapter sent over 35 students to Poe’s New and Used Bookstore for a night of reading, community, and good literature. I was among the students who attended the trip: here’s what happened and why you should give this quaint little bookshop a visit.
At 7:00 PM, we arrived at Poe’s. Those who attended included the esteemed Professor Catherine Dent and her fiction students, FUSE members, and other students within Susquehanna’s creative writing community. We were given the first half-hour to browse the shop, an eclectic selection of books ranging from the well-known to the downright obscure. Genres varied as well, from poetry to horror to classic to fantasy. Oh, there was so much fantasy, a whole wall dedicated to just that.
The reading began at promptly 7:30. FUSE leaders read the first six chapters from Kate Bernheimer’s How a Mother Weaned Her Girl From Fairytales, which Catherine had just finished teaching to my class earlier that week. We took out our copies of the book and followed along, reimagining Bernheimer’s work in a new light.
Afterward, at around 8:00, an hour was devoted to an open mic. Five community members read their original poems and short stories, all met with thunderous applause. The night ended as everyone purchased their books, everyone coming away with a Skribli notebook that a generous community member donated to the Susquehanna students. Nearly everyone left the bookshop with a stack of books, myself included. (I came away with a copy of The (Other) You by Joyce Carol Oates, Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy, and The Pearl by John Steinbeck. All for under $20. Everyone left with a vow to return to the bookshop in the future.
Poe’s New and Used Bookstore is a quaint little bookshop in New Berlin, only about 15 minutes away from the university. The shop is run by a local family, and hosts readings, open mics, and other literary events periodically. Poe’s sells homemade cookies, crochet, and DnD supplies alongside the regular book stock. If you can’t find the book you need, worry not: they’ll order books for you directly to the store. Poe’s is a delightful part of the Susquehanna community where good books, kind people, and intelligent literary discussion thrive. To those in the Susquehanna area, I highly advise giving the shop a visit.
Oh, and there were cats. Two of them, in case you weren’t convinced.