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Utah poet Joel Long and the indispensable City Art once again present an unbeatable bargain of another free night of poetry at the downtown Salt Lake City Main Library.
This time, the offerings pair one of Utah's best poets, University of Utah professor Jacqueline Osherow, with renowned national talent Cynthia Zarin, author of four collections of verse published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Winner of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters' Witter Bynner Prize, Osherow is one of but a handful of Utah poets to receive the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She's still well remembered from her 1999 collection Dead Men's Praise, which combined formal poetry conventions with Jewish humor and Dante's terza rima to bring wisdom and insight to some of history's darker questions. She's been widely anthologized, to boot, including two visits to Best American Poetry.
Zarin, meanwhile, is something of a force of nature, having written not just the four aforementioned collections, but essays, reporting, travel writing and children's books as well. A professor at Yale University, her latest collection, The Ada Poems, takes its inspiration from Vladimir Nabokov's mammoth über-novel, Ada, to produce a luminous series of poems sparked by love and others mysterious lights of the spirit. —
Poets Jacqueline Osherow and Cynthia Zarin
When • Dec. 7, 7 p.m.
Where • Salt Lake City Main Library, 210 E. 400 South, Salt Lake City
Info • Free. Visit http://slcityart.org/Cityart/Home.html for more information.