Athens, Ga. – The second of three Georgia Poetry Circuit events for the 2011-12 academic year will feature nationally known poet Todd Boss on Feb. 1 at 7 p.m. at Ciné located at 234 W. Hancock Ave. in Athens. Local writer and University of Georgia graduate student Jeff Fallis will open the reading.
Poetry circuit readings are sponsored locally by The Georgia Review, which was founded at UGA in 1947 and is one of the nation’s premier literary quarterlies. The event is free and open to the public.
Boss’s work is “never pretentious but always acrobatic, sensuous, technically inventive, muscular and fun,” said poet Tony Hoagland. Writer Sherman Alexie said that Boss “can make any rhyme feel like a concealed weapon.”
Boss grew up on an 80-acre cattle farm in Wisconsin. His debut poetry collection, “Yellowrocket” (W. W. Norton, 2008) will be followed next month by “Pitch,” also from Norton. His poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, Poetry, the London Times, the New Yorker and Best American Poetry. Boss’s libretto “Panic,” a verse retelling of Knut Hamsun’s “Pan,” will premiere this winter.
He is a co-founder of Motionpoems, a new poetry film initiative now developing a dozen poetry films in collaboration with Scribner’s Best American Poetry 2011. He lives in Saint Paul, Minn., with his wife and children.
Fallis’ poems have appeared in publications such as Ploughshares, the Oxford American, the Iowa Review, Quarterly West and RealPoetik and in the anthologies “Blues Poems” and “The Art of Losing.” He has held a residency in poetry at the Vermont Studio Center and was recently nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize.
Books by Boss will be available for sale at the event courtesy of Byhalia Books.
The final Georgia Poetry Circuit reading of 2011-12 will feature Dave Smith on April 2. The Georgia Review is also sponsoring a reading by two-time National Book Critics Circle Award winner Albert Goldbarth on April 4. For more information, call 706/542-3481 or see thegeorgiareview.com.