Poets Martha Collins and Gail Mazur will read from their new books. Book signing after the reading.
Martha Collins new book, White Papers (Pitt. Poetry, 2012) is a series of untitled poems that deal with race from a number of personal, historical, and cultural persepctives. The styles and
forms vary, but the primary focus is always on getting at what it has
meant and what it means to be “white” in a multi-racial and often racist
society.
Gail Mazur's most recent book is Figures in a Landscape (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011).
A NEW INCLUSIVENESS, a heady freedom, grounded in the facts of mortality, inform Gail Mazur’s recent poems, as if making them has served as both a bunker and a promontory, a way to survive, and to be exposed to, the profound underlying subject of this book: a husband’s approaching death. The intimate particulars of a shared life are seen from a great height—and then there’s the underlife of the bunker: endurance, holding on, life as uncompromising reality. This new work, possessed by the unique devil-may-care intensity of someone writing at the end of her nerves, makes Figures in a Landscape feel radiant, visionary, and exhilarating, rather than elegiac. Mazur’s masterly fusion of abstraction with the facts of a life creates a coming to terms with what Yeats called “the aboriginal ice.”