Athens, Ga. – The Georgia Review at the University of Georgia will present a reading by Noah Blaustein Feb. 4 at 7 p.m. at Ciné in downtown Athens. He is the second of three readers on the 2014-15 Georgia Poetry Circuit.
The reading is free and open to the public, and the poet’s books will be available courtesy of Avid Bookshop.
Blaustein, the author of “Flirt” (2013), has published poems in the Los Angeles Review, the Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Harvard Review, Orion, Pleiades, and many other journals. His anthology “Motion: American Sports Poems” was an editor’s pick of National Public Radio and The Boston Globe, and a Librarian’s Pick of the New York Public Library.
“This is a poet who makes a coat out of the stars and drapes it over the shoulders of the reader desperate to find a little warmth in the world. Flirt will change your life,” wrote Christopher Merrill about Blaustein’s work.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa said that “a seam of music runs through everything, holding “Flirt” together beautifully, succinctly.”
The Georgia Poetry Circuit is a consortium of colleges and universities that annually brings three poets of national reputation to its member campuses, providing important access to the literary arts for Georgia residents across the state. The Georgia Review has been the UGA liaison to the Circuit since the latter’s foundation in 1985.
The final Circuit reader for this academic year will be C.G. Hanzlicek on April 16 at Ciné.
For more information, see www.thegeorgiareview.com or see the Georgia Poetry Circuit website, http://www.berry.edu/gpc /.
A sample of Blaustein’s work is provided below:
How I Made My Money
I went to the loon and swapped
a “hello” for its mournful
song. I went to the barn and exchanged
a fistful of wasps for a swallow’s iridescence.
I sold letters of absolution as Christmas
gifts to the Lehman brothers. I made
my money the old fashioned way-I told
a bull one thing and a bear another. I executed
iron butterflies and short straddled
the black-crowned Phoebe’s pessimistic
black skull. No photo of me can be taken
without a price. When twelve hundred and fifty
blackbirds fell from the sky in a small
Midwest town, I shorted avian futures. Dawn
was a gray mist and the red stripes
on those birds’ black wings
cut through the steam of Omaha’s
coffee cups. I got out of the market
on a Fibonacci sunflower sequence high
and bought back in on a cheetah spot sequence low
I am the new soul of this country.
Go long on the cloud.
– First published in Pleiades, volume 33, number 1
