KGB Bar in the East Village, NYC | Wednesday, December 11 @7pm
A celebration of Judith Baumel’s extraordinary new book of poetry, Passeggiate at KGB Bar in the East Village.
Come for a reading of Judy’s gorgeous new work, and stay for a holiday party of gracious imbibing, book signing, and merriment.
Passeggiata means stroll in Italian, and this book takes us on a series of urgent walks and conversations. With characters from classical pastoral poems reborn as contemporary Sicilians and Bronxites, these poems depict love and war, lyric and loss, justice and anger. The otherworldly names hide and unveil, distance us and bring us close to essential questions. Refracting the wisdom of the Bible, Virgil, Theocritus, Milton, W.E.B. Du Boise, Wallace Stevens and Adrienne Rich, among others, these poems confront contemporary social and political disasters.
Event sponsored by Adelphi University’s MFA program in Creative Writing.
Judith Baumel’s previous books are The Weight of Numbers, for which she won The Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Now, and The Kangaroo Girl which was named a top five poetry book of 2011 by The Forward. She is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She has served as president of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, director of The Poetry Society of America and a Fulbright Scholar in Italy. Her poetry, translations and essays have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Agni Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among other places. Her work is represented in a number of anthologies including Telling and Remembering: A Century of Jewish American Poetry ; Gondola Signore Gondola: Poems on Venice; and Poems of New York (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets) and The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making.