July 13, 2011 Marilyn Kallet, Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has always been interested in Surrealism, but translating Benjamin Péret’s The Big Game has proven the most challenging—and most rewarding—of her forays. Kallet will read from the book on July 17 at 3 p.m. at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville. Also reading will be poets Jeff Daniel Marion and Donna Doyle.
June 27, 2011 Puerto Rico’s first murder. The Battle of Nashville. A dress blooming in the ocean. These are the images Nashville poet Blas Falconer offers listeners during a 2008 reading at the Art Institute of Chicago. In the program Falconer reads from his latest book, A Question of Gravity and Light (Arizona University Press, 2007).
June 16, 2011 Linda Parsons Marion is an editor at the University of Tennessee and the author of three poetry collections: Home Fires, Mother Land, and Bound. Marion’s work has appeared in journals such as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and Connecticut Review, as well as in many anthologies. She lives in Knoxville with her husband, poet Jeff Daniel Marion. Linda Parsons Marion will read from Bound at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on June 19 at 3 p.m.
June 8, 2011 For the past ten years or so it seems that all I think about and write about is Time, but something about learning that I have a form of liver cancer that is ultimately incurable has given me an amazing sense of clarity about the subject. I find myself standing on the back porch taking deep breaths, intoxicated by air and light and hope. Despite my bleak prognosis, I now see everything in front of me as a space of infinite possibility, within certain limitations, with a full and nourishing sense of Time.
June 7, 2011 In a career that spans forty-five years and includes twenty-some books of poetry and every major poetry prize, from the Pulitzer to the National Book Award, Charles Wright has kept his thematic lens remarkably focused. A typical poem begins with the speaker in his backyard, describing the landscape or the memory of a landscape, and the resulting metaphor then ignites a philosophical meditation, often concerning theological matters. For most poets, such thematic or stylistic repetition over the course of half a century would lead to unbearably boring poems. But Wright is in a class almost alone for his ability to make fresh, wildly inventive metaphors from the stuff of the everyday, natural world.
June 3, 2011 “Anything So Utterly Destroyed” by Elizabeth McClellan, a Gallatin-based poet and University of Memphis law student, has been nominated for a 2011 Rhysling Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. The Rhysling is a prize given to the best science-fiction, fantasy, or horror poem published during the previous year.
