March 12th
7:00 P.M.
Reading
Raquel Balboni,
David Blair,
Katherine Hollander
Raquel Balboni's poems have appeared in Art & Letters, The Boston Compass, the Brookline Rail, and many other places. XXX Poems is Raquel's 1st book. They were born in Cambridge, MA
“Right away with the book's opening poem, Raquel Balboni is telling me, ‘yeah I'm in between bodies right now…’ and so I'm in for astonishments, unabashed revelations, gambits of emotion, gutsy, frisky, and all the longings. From the looks of things, Raquel is the American poetry world's best kept secret, but hopefully not for long. Her first book, XXX Poems, is a remarkable debut.”
Gerard Malanga, poet & photographer
David Blair grew up in Pittsburgh. He is the author of three books of poetry, Ascension Days, which was chosen by Thomas Lux for the Del Sol Poetry Prize, Arsonville, and Friends with Dogs. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Ploughshares, Slate Magazine, and many other places as well, including the anthologies, The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Devouring the Green, and Zoland Poetry. He has taught at the New England Institute of Art, Bentley University, the online graduate program in creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University, and in the M.FA. Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire.. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter, and he has a degree in philosophy from Fordham University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His new book is Barbarian Seasons, Mad Hat Press, 2020
David Blair's poetry unfolds via his exuberantly free and associative imagination, through up and down precipitous, switchback trails of thought, feeling, and perception, and rueful recognitions of what he discerns in himself and others: our hopes and fears, griefs and grievances, myopias and mistakes. Nothing human is alien for this poet, and no poem is a still life. “How to be a person/ making mistakes,” the poet wonders at a central point in Barbarian Seasons, his panoramic, collective portrait of our strange and estranged lives in late-capitalist America. —Fred Marchant Author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)
Katherine Hollander is a poet and historian. Born in Boston, she was educated at Marlboro College and Boston University, where she earned an MA in poetry and a PhD in history. Her poems, criticism, and scholarly work have appeared in Literary Imagination, Slate, Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, The Brecht Yearbook, New German Critique, and elsewhere. She has taught European history at Simmons College, the University of Hartford, and Colby College, creative writing at Boston University, and serves as a Reader for Sugar House Review. Alongside writing poems, she is at work on a historical monograph about a community of German-speaking intellectuals in exile, and translating the childhood memoirs of Margarete Steffin.
“Abundant imagination, as heartbreaking and wild as folk tales. Informed historical understanding. Melody in the sentences and lines. Each of these is a rare poetic gift, and all three combined animate Katherine Hollander’s My German Dictionary. These poems with their lexicon of grief confront the terrors of history in a way that is brooding, clear-eyed, and blessedly inventive.” — Robert Pinsky