March is coming in like a humping elephant. I shudder to think how it will go out.

There’s an open mic and a mystery author, and a few other things about hyperserious subjects, too.

Bruce Barcott, who read yesterday at Elliott Bay Book Company, is up at Third Place Books today with his well-reviewed environmental reportage The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, about one woman’s efforts to save a Macaw’s nesting grounds from a dam. And at Elliott Bay tonight is the impressively-named Indran Amirthanayagam, with his new book The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems, which is about the massive, apocalyptic tsunami from a few years ago now. It’s also a great title, and I really like Amirthanayagam’s previous book title, The Elephants of Reckoning.

At SPL Central Branch, David Smith-Ferri reads from Battlefield Without Borders: Iraq Poems, which he wrote while in Iraq as a member of a fact-finding delegation. The vast majority of the sales of the book—$12 out of $14!—goes toward the Direct Aid Initiative.

Full readings calendar, including upcoming, non-deadly-serious-issue-related books, here.