The Friends of the Scotch Plains Public Library gathered 28 neighbors for an evening that was, by turns, mystical, measured, and quietly moving.
On the last evening of April, as the month surrendered itself to May, twenty-eight people settled into chairs at the Scotch Plains Public Library for something that does not happen everywhere — and, in a culture of algorithmic distraction, does not happen often enough: an unhurried hour and a half in the company of poets.
The third annual poetry night, hosted by the Friends of the Scotch Plains Public Library, opened at 6:30 with a welcome from Christine, the evening’s emcee and a steady, warm presence throughout. Three poets had been brought together for the occasion — each distinct in sensibility, each arriving from a different corner of the art form — and what unfolded was less a showcase than a conversation, the kind that continues in the parking lot afterward, or quietly, in the mind, for days.
“A certified Listener Poet, a four-time Pushcart nominee, and a self-described mystic walked into a library — and somehow it all made perfect sense.”
Moriah Cohen opened the evening. A 2023 New Jersey Council on the Arts fellow and the author of the chapbook Impossible Bottle (Finishing Line Press), Cohen brings to her work a precision that feels earned rather than imposed. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, Gulf Coast, the Cincinnati Review, and Best New Poets, among others; earlier this year, she was named a finalist for the Leonard Cohen Prize by ONLY POEMS. She is also a certified Listener Poet — a practice in which poetry is composed in direct response to another person’s story — and co-founded The Fields Poetry Reading Series. On Wednesday evening, she gave the audience roughly ten minutes of her work, then introduced students of her own, each of whom read a single poem. It was a generous gesture, and a quietly political one: she was insisting, in the most concrete way, that the circle be widened.
Ariana Merquri followed. She has been writing since the age of seven, and the years show — not in a weathered way, but in the way that a practice deepens. Her work, rooted in mysticism and enriched by a Rutgers education in psychology and linguistics, has moved from the pages of Teen Ink to White Stag’s Bloodlore, a trajectory that mirrors the expansion of her own interior life. Her poems have a way of finding the numinous inside the ordinary — which is, of course, the oldest task of the art form, and one of its most difficult.
Judith Christian anchored the second half of the evening. A poet of considerable range — she has received four Pushcart nominations and has work forthcoming in the 2026 Moving Words films, a project of ARTS By The People — Christian is also a visual artist, a past president of South Mountain Poets, and the author of two chapbooks: A Certain Knowing (The Paulinskill Poetry Project, 2018) and the limited-edition ekphrastic collection Shifted Construction Plate, which pairs her poems with paintings by the artist Mikel Frank. She considers herself a “dilettante artist,” a characterization that understates, with characteristic modesty, a practice that has appeared on gallery walls and journal covers alike.
Cohen returned at the end for a final poem — an encore of sorts, though the word feels too theatrical for the quietness of the moment — before the poets gathered to sign and sell their books, and the room loosened into conversation. It is in those minutes after, when strangers compare the lines that caught them, that a poetry reading becomes something more than a performance.
The Friends of the Scotch Plains Public Library have now done this three times. The model is simple and, in its simplicity, almost radical: bring people together, clear space, and let the language do what language does when it is handled well. Twenty-eight people came. That is not a small number, for poetry. It is not a small thing, either.
Moriah Cohen’s work can be found at moriahcohen.com. Information about the Friends of the Scotch Plains Public Library and future events is available at scotchplainsfriends.org