Catherine Morocco & Paul Nemser Poetry Reading At Newtonville Books

On February 25, 2015, at 7:00 pm, local poets Catherine Morocco and Paul Nemser will be reading at Newtonville Books in Newton Center.

Cambridge poet Paul Nemser will read from his award-winning Taurus (New American Press 2013), a phantasmagorical retelling of the abduction of Europa by Zeus set in contemporary St Petersburg,  and from his chapbook Tales of the Tetragrammaton (Mayapple Press 2014), an account of suburban life in the 1950’s  and a search for meaning and transcendence in the spirit of Jewish mysticism—as if Kafka were the act following the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Nemser’s poems appear widely in magazines such as AGNI, Blackbird, Linebreak, Poetry, and Raritan and are forthcoming in London Review of Books.  He has co-translated two books of Ukrainian poetry.

Newton poet Catherine Morocco will read from Moon without Craters or Shadows (Aldrich Press 2014). which explores her recovery from brain surgeries.  Poems draw on memories, hallucinations, and interviews with her children about her comatose periods, and excerpts from a journal she kept through her recovery.  Morocco’s poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, CALYX, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Salamander, and Comstock Review. “Son’s Story” in Moon without Craters or Shadows won the first prize for poetry about the brain from the Dana Foundation.  Morocco is also the author of two books on adolescent literacy.