Prize-Winning Poet Mark Halliday: Robert Lowell Memorial Reading Series
Prize-winning poet Mark Halliday will read at Boston University with BU alumna Heather Green for the spring installment of the Robert Lowell Memorial Reading Series. Introduced by Robert Pinsky. This event is free and open to the public, with a reception to follow.
Mark Halliday is a Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio University. His books of poems are: Little Star (William Morrow, 1987), Tasker Street (University of Massachusetts, 1992), Selfwolf (University of Chicago, 1999), Jab (University of Chicago, 2002), Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008), Thresherphobe (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Losers Dream On (University of Chicago Press, 2018). His critical study Stevens and the Interpersonal appeared in 1991 from Princeton University Press. He co-authored with Allen Grossman a book on poetics, The Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). He has published essays on more than twenty contemporary poets since 1996. Halliday has won the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Heather Green’s poems have appeared in AGNI online, Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, the New Yorker, and many other journals, and are forthcoming in the Bennington Review. Her translation of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won was published in 2018 by Octopus Books. Her translations of Tzara’s work have appeared in Asymptote, Open Letters Monthly, Poetry International, and several anthologies. She teaches at George Mason University.
SPRING LUNCHEON: AN AFTERNOON WITH BILLY COLLINS
On Thursday June 6, 2019, Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States (2001-2003) will be the guest of honor at the Spring Luncheon of the Holy Cross Club of Cape Cod. Following lunch, Mr. Collins, an Alumnus of the College of the Holy Cross Class of 1963, will offer some remarks, read selections from his poetry and offer a Q & A session. A book signing will follow for those who wish to meet him personally. Needless to say this is an exciting event for our Club and one that we wish to share with select groups across the Commonwealth.
Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar, he is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry. His readings are usually standing room only, and his audience – enhanced tremendously by his appearances on National Public Radio – includes people of all backgrounds and age groups. The poems themselves best explain this phenomenon. The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. No wonder Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” It is a door that many thousands of readers have opened with amazement and delight.
Midwinter Fire: A Poetry Reading with JOY LADIN, GAIL THOMAS, and LESLEA NEWMAN
Poets JOY LADIN, GAIL THOMAS, and LESLEA NEWMAN who have all had recent books published by Headmistress Press will read new and forthcoming work. JOY LADIN is the author of Fireworks in the Graveyard; GAIL THOMAS is the author of Odd Mercy, and LESLEA NEWMAN is the author of Lovely.
Award-winning poet CHUCK CARLISE at Trident Booksellers
Trident Booksellers is pleased to host award-winning poet CHUCK CARLISE for a night of his poetry from his newest collection In One Version of the Story. He will be reading, signing, and answering questions about the collection.
In One Version of the Story is a lyric exploration of the ways human beings confront desire, loss and absence by creating stories. Its narrative situation begins with the French folk legend of “l’Inconnue de la Seine”—the unidentified young woman who drowned herself in Paris in the 1880s, and whose (unauthorized) death mask was eventually cast as the face of Resusci-Anne CPR training dummies—but eventually the book encompasses a chronicle of personal loss, a history of photography, a study of the mechanics of breathing, and a solo climb to the rim of a Mediterranean volcano.
The book is a hybrid of narrative history, lyric meditation, and journalistic investigation— often implicating the speaker (and reader) in the act of “myth-making” itself. It is story-making itself, which is interrogated here; however, the book seeks not to recreate narratives, but rather to understand why they matter and how we attribute the meaning that we create.
This event is free and open to the public.
YA author BENJAMIN ALIRE SAENZ (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe) at Brookline Booksmith
Brookline Booksmith is pleased to welcome BENJAMIN ALIRE SAENZ, author of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, for a reading and discussion of his latest young adult novel: The Inexplicable Logic of My Life.
Sal used to know his place with his adoptive gay father, their loving Mexican American family, and his best friend, Samantha. But it’s senior year, and suddenly Sal is throwing punches, questioning everything, and realizing he no longer knows himself. If Sal’s not who he thought he was, who is he?
This event is free and open to the public.
Award-winning poet FRANK BIDART reads Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
Harvard Book Store welcomes Wellesley College professor and award-winning poet FRANK BIDART—author of Desire, Star Dust, Watching the Spring Festival, and Metaphysical Dog—for a reading from his latest poetry collection, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016.
Gathered together, the poems of FRANK BIDART perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us.
This book will be for sale at the event for 20% off. There will also be a signing after the event.
No tickets required for entry.
Launch party for local novelist JENNIFER TSENG’s The Passion of Woo & Isolde
Some may know JENNIFER TSENG’s story “The Words ‘Honey’ and ‘Moon'” from The Papercuts Anthology: Volume 1. Join Papercuts JP for the launch party of The Passion of Woo & Isolde & Other Stories, TSENG’s newest chapbook and winner of Rose Metal Press’s 11th Annual Chapbook Contest judged by Amelia Gray.
The Passion of Woo & Isolde & Other Stories scintillates with the thrall of the unknown and the forbidden, the immigrant and the exile. In each of these twenty-four very short fictions, novelist and poet JENNIFER TSENG explores the limits and limitlessness of our ability to see.
This event is not ticketed.
Poet EZRA DAN FELDMAN presents Habitat of Stones
Porter Square Books welcomes poet EZRA DAN FELDMAN as he reads from his poetry collection Habitat of Stones.
FELDMAN’s poetry collection is tied together by a certain “arrogant man.” This recurrent theme throughout the collection also bumps up against notions of the body: its finitude, its mortality and the struggles and regret of intimate relationships.
“Exposing patriarchal and capitalistic practices that often cripple society, Ezra Dan Feldman’s Habitat of Stones reveals the symptoms of living in a post-industrial and illusional, high-tech world: ‘He’s taken the world for a machine, a baby for a doll, a gun for a candy bar, which he offered to everyone…” –Mark Irwin
This event is not ticketed.
A Night of Poetry at Harvard Book Store
Harvard Book Store welcomes prize-winning poet ADRIENNE RAPHEL and Catenary Press co-editor DANIEL POPPICK for readings from their debut poetry collections, What Was It For and The Police.
In her debut collection What Was It For, Adrienne Raphel revitalizes the topsy-turvy lyric and its evergreen sagacity.
Charged with an electric syntax, haunted by lyric history, and “gripped in gravity’s mood,” the poems in The Police ask: How do we navigate the miasma that we call a common language?
This event is not ticketed.
