New Poems: A Reading

Kim Addonizio is an award-winning author of fiction, essays, and poetry. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award, and she has won Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and prose. She is also the author of two popular writing guides for poets, The Poet’s Companion and Ordinary Genius, and teaches and performs internationally. As a writer of provocative poems and stories, she has encountered success along with snark: one critic dismissed her as “Charles Bukowski in a sundress.” (“Why not Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu?” she muses.) Now, in Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin), an utterly original memoir in essays, she opens up to chronicle the joys and indignities in the life of a writer wandering through middle age.  Passionate and irreverent Addonizio’s poetry collection, Mortal Trash (W.W. Norton), transports the readers into a world of wit, lament, and desire. Whether comic, elegiac, or ironic, the poems in Mortal Trash remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry Blowout (Pittsburgh) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh); Two and Two (Pittsburgh); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh); The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press); and Kinky (Orhisis).  She and Maureen Seaton co-authored CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press). Duhamel is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  She is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.

Catherine Bowman is the award-winning author of 1-8OO-HOT-RIBS, Rock Farm, Notarikon, The Plath Cabinet, as well as editor of Word of Mouth: Poems, which was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, the Paris Review, the LA Times and Best American Poetry among other journals. She lives on a farm and teaches literature, writing, and poetry at Indiana University Bloomington. The poems in Bowman’s latest collection Can I Finish, Please? (Four Way Books), are shape-shifting acts, lyric interruptions that crave and resist completion, where the mutable self and the world are made and unmade over and over.

David Rivard is the author of five previous collections, including Otherwise Elsewhere and Wise Poison, winner of the James Laughlin Award. He teaches at the University of New Hampshire. For three decades, David Rivard has written from deep within the skin of our times. With Standoff: Poems (Graywolf Press), he asks an essential question: In a world of noise, of global anxiety and media distraction, how can we speak to each other with honesty? These poems scan the shifting horizons of our world, all the while swerving elastically through the multitude of selves that live inside our memories and longings. The work of these poems is a counterweight to the work of the world. It wants to deepen the mystery we are to ourselves, stretching toward acceptance and tenderness in ways that are hard-won and true, even if fleeting.