The Georgia Review at the University of Georgia will present a reading by nationally known poet Jacqueline Osherow Nov. 5 at 7 p.m. at Ciné, which is located at 234 West Hancock Avenue in downtown Athens. Free and open to the public, the event is part of Osherow’s tour on the statewide Georgia Poetry Circuit.
Osherow is the author of six books of poems: “Looking for Angels in New York” (1988) and “Conversations with Survivors” (1993) both published by the University of Georgia Press; “With a Moon in Transit” (1996) and “Dead Men’s Praise” (1999) from Grove Press; “The Hoopoe’s Crown” (2005) from BOA Editions; and her latest, “Whitethorn” (2011) from Louisiana State University Press.
Salt Lake City Weekly praises Osherow’s “strong yet understanding voice” and observes that her “inviting, conversational tone” allows the poet to “explore such heavy issues as modern Jewish-ness, biblical inconsistencies and the horrific implications of the Holocaust without isolating the reader.”
Osherow has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She was awarded the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and has received a number of prizes from the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry (Thomson Wadsworth, 2006), Twentieth Century American Poetry (McGraw Hill, 2004), The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (Penguin, 2001), The Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Literature (Norton, 2000) and Best American Poetry (1995 and 1998). She is a Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.
The Georgia Poetry Circuit is a consortium of 10 colleges and universities that annually brings three poets of national and international reputation to the member campuses, providing important access to the literary arts for Georgia residents across the state. It was founded in 1985 by Adrienne Bond of Mercer University in Macon, Ga. The Georgia Review, the international literary quarterly published by UGA since its inception in 1947, has been a supporter of the circuit since its founding.
In addition to Osherow, two other circuit poets will visit Athens during the 2012-2013 academic year-Marianne Boruch on Feb. 1 and Paul Hostovsky on April 11. Both events will begin at 7 p.m. at Ciné.
The Jacqueline Osherow reading is part of the UGA Arts Council’s Spotlight on the Arts festival. More than 50 events are scheduled during the nine-day festival Nov. 3-11. For more information, see arts.uga.edu.
For more information, contact the The Georgia Review at 706/542-3481, see www.thegeorgiareview.com or see the Georgia Poetry Circuit official website at http://www.berry.edu/gpc/.
Note to editors: A sample of Osherow’s poetry is provided:
Autumn Cottonwood
These days there’s not a thing I don’t regret
but thanks anyway, emphatic cottonwood,
Ms. over-the-top gold backlit by storm cloud,
for trying to persuade me to get over it,
that each defective day is worth resuming.
Poor tree. You don’t know what’s coming.
Enjoy it while it lasts; I won’t tell.
You’ll find out soon enough. Fall is fall.
Unless you get used to losing everything?
Still, I wouldn’t want to take your place.
My misfortune’s relatively mild;
I’ve got piles of stuff; I’m even singing.
It was pure hubris – or was it avarice? –
to think I could hang on to all that gold.
©Jacqueline Osherow, Whitethorn, LSU Press, 2012
