Enjoy some early March delights and surprises about the world we inhabit with two masters of poetry and prose who will read in the Poetry at the Library Series on Sunday, March 5 at 2 p.m. in the Main Library’s Goodwin Forum. Mikko Harvey, winner of the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and the Philip Booth Poetry Prize, reads from his second collection, Let the World Have You, and Nina MacLaughlin, books columnist for the Boston Globe and acclaimed author of two prior books, reads from her lyric essays on the moods of the sky and the solstices (in The Paris Review Daily and from Summer Solstice: An Essay).
Harvey and MacLaughlin will also engage in a Q and A about inspirations and craft, followed by book signings and light refreshments.
REGISTER FOR A SEAT IN THE FORUM.
Mikko Harvey’s Let the World Have You (House of Anansi Press, 2022) invites readers into a world that is and is not the world we know. In poems at once surreal, satiric, and tender, we encounter a cast of surprising non-human characters — the bear who sells herbal remedies, the politically influential lizard, the mean butterfly — yet at the core of this book is Harvey’s impulse to confront the challenges of human intimacy.
Offering a language for our shared bewilderment in this life, this is a vulnerable work, equally brutal and gentle as it keeps turning toward the most remarkable things. I felt humbled by this book and its insistence that the world continues to unfold before us with endless surprises, including that of its own generous care.” —Julie Choffel, Orion Magazine
Nina MacLaughlin’s intimate lyric essays depict her relationship with the sky and her “astonishment of being alive”, bringing to bear such voices as those of Charles Simic (the sky’s ‘dark corners’), and Chilean poet Raul Zurita (his kilometer-tall letters bulldozed onto the earth, messages only to be only read from the sky).
“[MacLaughlin] is a master writer, with the rare combination of acute observation and astute word choice that characterizes writers like Annie Dillard or Joan Didion.” – Boston Globe
Mikko Harvey is also the author of the poetry collection Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit (House of Anansi, 2018). A graduate of Vassar College and The Ohio State University, Harvey has received the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and the Philip Booth Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. He currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. www.mikkoharvey.com
Nina MacLaughlin is also the author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung (FSG/FSG Originals), a re-telling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses told from the perspective of the female figures transformed. Her first book was the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (W.W. Norton). Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter. Her work has appeared on or in The Paris Review Daily, The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Agni, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She carves spoons and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. http://www.ninamaclaughlin.com
The Poetry at the Library Series is sponsored by the Friends of the Library.
