[Yale-readings] 4/26 : Gail Mazur and Eleanor Lerman

[Kuhl, Nancy]

Ordinary Evening Reading Series Presents
Gail Mazur and Eleanor Lerman, 4/26 at 7pm - Anchor Bar


Pop the champagne, catch the A train and join Ordinary Evening to celebrate readings by two acclaimed poets, Gail Mazur and Eleanor Lerman, on Tuesday April 26 at 7PM in the Anchor Bar's Mermaid Room, 272 College Street in New Haven. This is a breath-taking way to delight in Poetry Month and springtime!

Everyone's here in the pictures, nobody appears
what you'd call pleased-my stunned father looks sweet,
your mother, gowned in scarlet lace décolletage,
loathes us all and won't stop smiling.  I seem bride-ish,
blank, I've rehearsed the whole thing.  No one's going
to shout Stop! when the rabbi in the name
of the Commonwealth invites the congregation
to object to our union.  It turns out this is it,
we're both quaking, our hands vibrating, both thinking,
This is a terrible mistake, thinking, I bet we'll pay
for this later.
--From "Wedding Album," by Gail Mazur



        ...Last night,
when I got on the subway, I jostled a woman holding
a copy of X. When she complained, instead of
hitting her with my shoe, which would have
once been my modus operandi, I heard myself
suggest that somebody reading such an interesting
book could have been expected to be a little more
philosophical about things that happen on a
rainy night in a crowded city.

-- From "A Rainy Night in a Crowded City," by Eleanor Lerman


Gail Mazur's poems celebrate the din and detail of ordinary life. Her sixth collection of poems, Figures in a Landscape, has just been published by University of Chicago Press.  Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems, published in 2005, won the Massachusetts Book Award, and her 2001 volume They Can't Take That Away from Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Gail published her first collection, Nightfire, in 1978 and followed that with The Pose of Happiness (1986).

A graduate of Smith College, Gail has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Active in the Boston and Cambridge literary communities, she has served as the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center, and as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College.

Eleanor Lerman's most recent collection of poems, The Sensual World Re-Emerges, was published by Sarabande Press in 2010. It has been nominated for three awards: ForeWord's Book of the Year (poetry), The Audre Lorde Poetry Award from the Publishing Triangle, and the Lambda Literary Award (poetry). Her collection of short stories, The Blonde on the Train (Mayapple Press), came out in 2009.

Eleanor's first book of poetry, Armed Love (Wesleyan University Press), was published in 1973 when she was twenty-one and was nominated for a National Book Award. While Eleanor quickly became known as an exciting young poet with a direct, new voice, she also faced criticism for her explicit depiction of then-shocking subject matter. One more collection, Come the Sweet By and By, followed in 1975, and then, partly in response to the backlash against her first book, she did not write another book of poems until 2001, when The Mystery of Meteors was published. This was followed by Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds (2005), which received the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the year's most outstanding book of poetry.

Raised in the Bronx and Far Rockaway, Eleanor has lived in New York City all her life.

ABOUT THE ORDINARY EVENING SERIES

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series presents readings by poets, novelists, and non-fiction writers. We welcome drinkers and teetotalers alike and hope you can join us for what the New Haven Independent called "one of those unofficial civic ventures that make New Haven such a vibrant place."

Read writers' biographies, find links to more writing, send us an email, and more at http://www.ordinaryevening.blogspot.com<https://email.hbs.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=090e06d980144c219acb648d075147f2&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.ordinaryevening.blogspot.com%2f>.



The Yale-Readings Listserv is sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. To post announcements about poetry and fiction readings, send the full text of the announcement, including contact information, to nancy.kuhl at yale.edu.<http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/yale-readings> Messages sent directly to the Yale-Readings list may not be posted.

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