Grolier Poetry Book Shop
2014, FALL READING SERIES 
GROLIER POETRY BOOK SHOP
6 PLYMPTON STREET
CAMBRIDGE, MA


Poetry Discussion
Friday, September 12th
7:00 p.m.


Philip N
                                         Adam Kirsch         Philip Nikolayev  Marjorie Perloff

Adam Kirsch was born in Los Angeles in 1976. He is the son of lawyer, author, and biblical scholar Jonathan Kirsch. He started writing poetry around the age of 14 after he read the poetry of T.S. Eliot, stating, "Eliot showed me the possibility of finding in poetry a source of complex intellectual and moral interest." In 1997, he graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in English. After graduation, he worked as the assistant literary editor for The New Republic. Next he worked as the editor for Lipper Publications.  Over the course of his career, he has written reviews and feature articles on a diverse array of poets and novelists, including Charles Bukowski, Emily Dickinson, Kay Ryan, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Richard Wilbur, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, John Keats, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Hart Crane, and David Foster Wallace. He has also written articles on assorted cultural issues, covering topics like rap music, America and the Roman Empire, the relationship between conservative politics in America and the writings of Ayn Rand, and the importance of literary criticism.  Adam Kirsch's The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry(2008) is published by W.W. Norton.Kirsch has published two books of poems, The Thousand Wells and Invasions, as well as non-fiction books on Benjamin Disraeli and Lionel Trilling. The Thousand Wells won The New Criterion Poetry Prize in 2002. His poems have also appeared in many magazines including The Paris Review, Partisan Review, The Formalist,Harvard Review, and The New Criterion.


 

Philip Nikolayev was Born in Moscow and raised in Russia and Moldova.  He grew up speaking both English and Russian and immigrated to the United States in 1990. Nikolayev earned a BA and an MA at Harvard University and a PhD at Boston University. His poetry collections include Dusk Raga (1998), Monkey Time(2003), which won a Verse prize, and Letters From Aldenderry (2006).  In his poems, Nikolayev pairs philosophical questions with daily life, frequently combining formal and experimental approaches. In an interview with Jack Alun for The Argotist Online, Nikolayev stated, "Writing is largely spontaneous for me and improvisation and self-surprise are important parts of it. ... I write in hopes that what moves or interests or surprises me may also cause a similar response in someone else-the providential reader, in Mandelstam's phrase, if you will. Often I don't know exactly where a poem-a certain kind of poem-leads me until the very end, where with some luck everything just happens to click sharply into focus." Nikolayev is one of the founding editors of Fulcrum, "an annual of poetry and aesthetics," and his work has been featured in 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (2005). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
 

Marjorie Perloff teaches courses and writes on twentieth and now twenty-first century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. She is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California.  She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Her publications include: Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (University of Chicago Press, 1991), The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 1996), Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters (University of Chicago Press, 1998),  Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions  (Northwestern University Press, 1998), The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, with a New Preface (University of Chicago Press, 2003), Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (University of Alabama Press, 2004),  Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and forthcoming  Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays (University of Chicago Press, fall 2014). 


 

Tuesday, September 16th 

4:oo p.m.
Book Launch
Adrienne Odasso


Adrienne Odasso's poetry has appeared in a wide variety of strange and wonderful publications, including Sybil's Garage, Mythic Delirium, Jabberwocky, Cabinet des F�es, Midnight Echo, Not One of Us, Dreams & Nightmares, Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, and many more. Her d�but collection,Lost Books (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2010), was nominated for the 2010 LNPA Best New Poet Award and for the 2011 Forward Prize, and was also a finalist for the 2011 People's Book Prize. Her two chapbooks, Devil's Road Down and Wanderlust, are available from Maverick Duck Press.  She is Poetry Co-Editor at Strange Horizons magazine. The Dishonesty of Dreams is her second full collection.  After almost seven years living in the United Kingdom, she returned to the US in 2012 and now lives in Beacon Hill.


 

Wednesday, September 17th

6:30 pm

 Reading @ Cambridge Public Library

Main Branch

Co-Sponsored by The Cambridge Public Library and The Grolier Poetry Book Shop

Tomasz Rozycki | - Mira Rosenthal

        

 

Tomasz Rozycki  is a poet, critic, and translator. Over the last ten years, he has garnered almost every prize Poland has to offer, as well as widespread critical and popular acclaim in translation in numerous languages. Rozycki is the author of seven volumes of poetry, most recently Kolonie (Colonies) and Księga obrot�w (The Book of Rotations). Over the course of his career, he has developed an extraordinarily distinctive, personal poetic voice that combines highly concrete imagery with evocative references to the historical legacy of his family and his time. He has lived his whole life in Opole.  He is considered to be an inheritor of the tradition of Czesław Miłosz and Adam Zagajewski, and his highly formal work deals with questions of both literary and ancestral tradition. His awards include the Krzysztof Kamiel Baczyński Prize (1997), the Czas Kultury Prize (1997), The Rainer Maria Rilke Award (1998), the Kościelski Foundation Prize (2004), and the Joseph Brodski Prize from Zeszyty Literackie (2006). He has been nominated twice for the Nike Prize (Poland's top literary honor) and once for the Paszport Polityki (2004). He lives in his hometown of Opole with his wife and two children and teaches at Opole University. Zephyr Press has also published his The Forgotten Keys
. 

 

 

Mira Rosenthal discovered her passion for translating contemporary Polish poetry. Her translations and scholarship on Polish literature have received numerous awards, including fellowships from the PEN Translation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her own poetry has been published widely, and her collection The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize, came out from Kent State in 2011. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Houston and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Indiana University. She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

 

   Saturday, September 20th
7:00 p.m.
Poetry Reading
Dileep Jhaveri


Born in 1943, Dileep Jhaveri is one of the most dynamic and articulate poets writing in

India today. Like the Czech poet Miroslav Holub, his poetry mixes the objectivity of a

scientist with an indefatigable lyricism. For Jhaveri, poetry is a theatre of ideas,

emotions, and theoretical propositions. Dileep Jhaveri is a practicing general physician

based in Thane, near Mumbai, and a well-known Gujarati poet and playwright.

 

Dr. Jhaveri has published two collections of poetry in Gujarati as well as a play Vyaasochchhvas, which has been translated into English as A Breath of Vyas by Kamal Sanyal. He also writes poetry in English, and a book of these poems has been translated into Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock under the title Rogha Danta.  In addition, many of Dr. Jhaveri's poems have been anthologized, and his Gujarati poetry has been translated into English, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Bengali, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. Also, Dr. Jhaveri has translated and edited a book of contemporary Gujarati poetry into English entitled Breath Becoming a Word, which was subsequently translated into Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock. Recently published in the United States by Feral Press, his latest book in English is titled Once This Mist Clears.

Dr. Jhaveri has received the Critic Award (1989), Jayant Pathak Award for Poetry (1989), the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad Award (1990), as well as a life-time achievement award from the state government of Maharashtra and the prestigious Karunanidhi Award from Tamilnadu. Inside India, he has been invited to read his works by the Central and State Sahitya Akademis, festivals such as the Hyderabad Literary Festival, universities, and other literary groups. He also has been invited to read widely abroad including at the Asian Poets' Conference in Korea in 1986, Taiwan in 1995, and such other countries as Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. More recently, he was invited to read his poetry in the U.S. by Georgetown University and South Asian Language Association for the organization's 2009 convention. Dileep Jhaveri currently serves on the editorial boards of Museindia.com and the Kobita Review.



 

*Friday September, 26th

7:00 p.m.
 Umit Singh Dhuga


*Bio forthcoming 

 

Saturday, October 4th

5:30-7:00 P.M.

Launch Party for 

SpoKe 

Reading

Ruth Lepson, Margo Lockwood. Ben Mazer, Patrick Pritchett

 

Friday, October 10th

7:00 p.m.
 Poetry Reading

Denise Bergman

 


 

Denise Bergman's A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea was published by West End Press in 2014.  The book won the West End Press Patricia Clark Smith Poetry Prize.

The Telling, a book-length poem, was published in 2013 by Červen� Barva Press.

Her book Seeing Annie Sullivan, poems based on the early life of Helen Keller's teacher (Cedar Hill Books), was translated into Braille and into a Talking Book. She was the editor of City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry (West End Press), and author of Keyhole Poems, a sequence that combines the history of specific urban places with the present. Her poems have been widely published.  An excerpt from her poem "Red," about the effects of a slaughterhouse, was permanently installed by the city of Cambridge, MA, in a neighborhood park. She was featured as a Split This Rock Poet of the Week in May 2013.


 

Tuesday, October 14th

Poetry Reading

7:00 p.m. 

  Melissa Buckheit and Amy King


       


 

Melissa Buckheit is a poet, dancer/choreographer, photographer, English Lecturer and Bodywork Therapist. She is the author of Noctilucent (Shearsman Books, 2012), Arc (The Drunken Boat, 2007), and her poems, translations, photography, interviews and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Her Kind, The Drunken Boat, Tarpaulin Sky, Sinister Wisdom, Can-Can, Bombay Gin, Spiral Orb, Shearsman Magazine, and Sonora Review, among others. Olga Broumas has described her poetry as deploying "the sensory intricacies of high lyric, iridescent candor & dynamic range to serve our imagination an eclectic feast of electrifying, intimate, thermospheric meditations," and Jocelyn Heath, in a review in Lambda Literary, noted that, "Buckheit pairs earthly longings with writings of celestial delicacy to show us what we can see when we look beyond immediacy. Her collection, like the noctilucent cloud that shares its name, lingers long in the atmosphere." Buckheit translates the poet Ioulita Iliopoulou from Modern Greek, and is a recipient of the American Poets Honorary Award, a Tucson-Pima Arts Council Dance grant, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. She served on the poetry committee for the Tucson Festival of Books, and founded and has curated the innovative Edge Reading Series for Emerging and Younger Writers, in Tucson, AZ, since 2007. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Naropa University and a B.A. from Brandeis University. She teaches at Pima Community College. 


 

Amy King is the author of  Slaves to Do These Things, I'm the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, all from Blazevox Books, as well as The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press) and Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country (Dusie Press). Of  her most recent book, I Want to Make You Safe, (Litmus Press, 2011), John Ashbery described her poems as bringing "abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living."  Safe was one of the Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2011, and it was reviewed, among others, by the Poetry Foundation and the Colorado Review.  King was also honored by The Feminist Press as one of the "40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism" awardees, her poems  have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and she has been the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship for Poetry. The Missing Museum is forthcoming in 2014 from Kore Press.  King serves on the executive board of VIDA: Woman in Literary Arts and she moderates the Women's Poetry Listserv (WOMPO).  She co-edited the PEN Poetry Series and Esque Magazine with Ana Bozicevic, and founded and curated, from 2006-2010, the Brooklyn-based reading series, The Stain of Poetry. She teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.  


 

Friday October 17th

7:00 p.m.

Reading

Kimiko Hahn


 

   
 


Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight previous books of poetry, including, Toxic Flora. She has won an American Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Theodore Roethke Award, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award. Hahn has also won the Poetry Society of America Shelley Memorial Award and the PEN/Voecler Award for Poetry. She lives in New York and teaches at Queens College, City University of New York

 "In Brain Fever, Kimiko Hahn moves through the rooms of the mind with an oneiric weightlessness. She also touches concrete ground in the realm of neuroscience, and in the world outside the mind, where love, betrayal, regret, and debilitating loss reside. This is a beautiful and troubling book, a marriage of what matters most: the mysteries buried at our very core and the world that cradles and cuts into us at every turn." 

- Tracy K. Smith


 


 Friday, October 24th 

7:00 p.m.

Reading Grey Gowrie

Introduced by Christopher Ricks


 


 

Grey Gowrie was born in Dublin in 1939.  Educated and professionally engaged in England and the USA, he made his home in Ireland until 1983 when he moved to the Welsh Marches. He taught English and American literature at Harvard and University College London and in 1972, on publishing his first collection of poems, exchanged an academic career for business and public life.  He has been a company chairman, a Cabinet minister, Chairman of the Arts Council of England and Provost of the Royal College of Art.  Literature. His book Third Day New and Collected Poems was published in (2013 Sheep Meadow Press).


 

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks (born 1933) is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (U.S.) and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (England) from 2004 to 2009.  Hugh Kenner has praised his 'intent eloquence', and Geoffrey Hill his 'unrivaled critical intelligence'. W. H. Auden described Ricks as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'. John Carey calls him the 'greatest living critic.

Friday, November 7th
7:00 p.m.
Poetry Reading
Ewa Chrusciel

  
 
Ewa Chrusciel writes in both  Polish and English. She has two books in Polish. Her first book in English, Strata, won the 2009 international book contest and was published with Emergency Press in 2011. Her second book in English Contraband of Hoopoe is forthcoming with Omnidawn Press in 2014. Her third book Dybbuk of Angelus was a finalist with River Run Press. Her poems were featured in Jubilat, Boston Review, Colorado Review,Lana Turner, Spoon River Review, Aufgabe among others. She translated Jack London, Joseph Conrad, and I.B. Singer into Polish and Jorie Graham, Lyn Hejinian and Cole Swensen into English.


"The excitement one experiences reading the Polish and American poet Ewa Chrusciel's new book is hard to describe. If one made an amalgam of Darwin, early Hejinian, Byzantine art, near Eastern books of wisdom, Ponge, Pavese, sacred Hopi and Amerindian texts, one still wouldn't be able to come up with the magical contraband this vessel is carrying."

-Jorie Graham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry


 


 Friday, November 21st

7:00 p.m.

Sandra Lim, Katie Peterson


 

Sandra Lim is the author of The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Gl�ck for the most recent Barnard Women Poets Prize, and a previous collection of poetry, Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). A 2015 Pushcart Prize winner, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Getty Research Institute. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.


 

Katie Peterson was Professor of the practice of poetry Tufts University for three years. She recently  moved to California to teach at a small college, Deep Springs. for the Spring. She will begin teaching at UC Davis in the winter.  In 2013 she published two books, Permission (New Issues) and The Accounts (University of Chicago Press). The Accounts was the winner of the 2014 Rilke Award from the University of North Texas. She is also the author of This One Tree (New Issues).  Her essays on poetry have appeared widely this year, and new poems appear in the Kenyon Review, APR, West Branch, and Zyzzyva.  Peterson earned a B.A. at Stanford University and a doctorate in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard, where her dissertation on Emily Dickinson won the Howard Mumford Jones Prize. 


 


 

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