Tuesday
February 20th
6:30pm
The Maude Fife Room
* Read a sample of her work
February 20th
6:30pm
The Maude Fife Room
* Read a sample of her work
*This
event has passed.
Watch or listen online!
*From Library Journal
Cole Swensen
New poetry from "One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry"*
With graduate poet Rachel Beck
New poetry from "One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry"*
With graduate poet Rachel Beck
Cole Swensen is the author of eleven books of
poetry, including Goest, which was a
National Book Award finalist. She is the recepient
of the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book
Award, two Pushcart Prizes, a 2006 Guggenheim
Fellowship in Poetry, and her work was a National
Poetry Series Selection. She is on the permenant
faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and she
divides her time between Iowa, Washington DC and
Paris.
Swensen's poetry is filled with delicate and
precise illuminations. The ordinary things to which
the poet turns her gaze are revealed to be
astonishing, full of the withheld, or at least the
under-observed.
In her newest collection, The Glass Age (Alice James Books, 2006), she explores the perceptive space of the transparent-- of glass-- revealing, as John Ashbery puts it that "seeing is believing sometimes, but believing is almost always seeing." Her poetry is described as scholarly, meticulous, daring, assured, thoughtful--and like the reflective and penetrable surfaces she describes the poems manage to hold all of these qualities and yet remain utterly luminous.
In her newest collection, The Glass Age (Alice James Books, 2006), she explores the perceptive space of the transparent-- of glass-- revealing, as John Ashbery puts it that "seeing is believing sometimes, but believing is almost always seeing." Her poetry is described as scholarly, meticulous, daring, assured, thoughtful--and like the reflective and penetrable surfaces she describes the poems manage to hold all of these qualities and yet remain utterly luminous.