Poets Alicia Ostriker and Hayden Saunier read from their latest collections of poetry and discuss their inspiration and writing process. Refreshments will be served. Book signing to follow.
About the Collections:
"The Holy & Broken Bliss: Poems in Plague Time" by Alicia Ostriker examines how we can find meaning in the face of aging, illness, and the inevitability of death and also ponders how we respond to the double plague of a fierce pandemic and a divided society. The observant and urgent poems of this volume are grounded in daily existence, human tenderness, the rituals of a long marriage, and the poet’s ongoing spiritual quest. In the middle of a world that seems to be breaking down into suffering and anger, the spare and direct lines of these poems, surrounded by silence, offer a kind of healing. The poems ask us to consider what living looks like inside of ongoing misery (misery we often are responsible for making and accepting). They call us to ask ourselves how we locate joy and even laughter when despair is ever-present.
Hayden Saunier's collection "Wheel" contains wisdom, humor, and quiet reveries, lots of farm and house chores, much regret and gratitude. The volume contains finely tuned lyric poems that contemplate the circularity of being, its darkness, its hope and all but refuses to be read silently; readers may find themselves unknowingly slipping into recitation. Poetic forms like sonnets and pantoums are interspersed with poems in free verse. Above all, these are poems of much wisdom expressed with gentle humility, poems of things botanical, animal, and human, all that flourishes and falls
About the Poets:
Alicia Ostriker has published 19 collections of poetry, been twice nominated for the National Book Award, and has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, among other honors. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Atlantic, Prairie Schooner, and other journals, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Her most recent collections of poems are "Waiting for the Light" and "The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019." She was New York State Poet Laureate for 2018-2021 and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2015-2020. She lives with her husband in New York City.
Hayden Saunier is a poet, actor, and teaching artist living in the Philadelphia area. She has published five collections of poetry and her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Gell Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, the Rattle Poetry Grand Prize, and nominated numerous times for a Pushcart Prize. Her acting resume includes film and television appearances in "The Sixth Sense," "Philadelphia Diary," "House of Cards," "Mindhunter," "Hack" and "Do No Harm" and dozens of roles at regional theaters such as the Guthrie Theatre, Walnut Street Theatre, Arden Theatre, George Street Playhouse, Interact Theatre and People's Light and Theatre Company. Hayden is a Poet Laureate Emerita of Bucks County and she lives on a farm in Pennsylvania.
Presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
