Tuesday, September 27, 7pm – Poetry
Daniel Nester, Elizabeth Gold, David Yezzi, Ernest Hilbert
Elizabeth Gold’s writing about books, music, women’s liberation, and paper dolls has appeared in The Believer, Tin House, the Rumpus, Time Out New York, and several anthologies. Her memoir, Philly Soul, is about rhythm & blues, and growing up bohemian; her opera libretto, The Bloody Chamber (with composer Daniel Felsenfeld), has been performed in New York and San Francisco. She’s currently completing DON’T TOUCH ME!, a surreal novel about a born-again Christian singer/reality-TV star. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and baby daughter.
Ernest Hilbert’s debut collection is Sixty Sonnets (2009), which X.J. Kennedy called “the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America.” His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, Verse, American Scholar, and the London Review. Hilbert was the poetry editor for Random House’s magazine Bold Type in New York City (1998-2003) and, more recently, of the Contemporary Poetry Review (2005-2010). His poems have appeared in several anthologies, including the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets and two Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology.
Daniel Nester’s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction (Soft Skull 2010). Nester’s first two books, God Save My Queen: A Tribute (Soft Skull, 2003) and God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On (2004), are collections of his obsession with the rock band Queen. Poet Todd Colby has written that Nester is an “absolute master of what he does; and what he does is dazzle us repeatedly with his elegant, prickly, and wickedly penetrating poems.” As a journalist and essayist, his work has appeared in Salon, The Daily Beast, Time Out New York, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Bookslut.
David Yezzi’s poetry collections include Azores (2008) and The Hidden Motel (2003), and his criticism and poetry have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Best American Poetry. Critic Adam Kirsch, who selected Azores as one of Slate’s Best Books of 2008, noted that Yezzi’s poetry “displays a civilized mastery reminiscent of Philip Larkin and Donald Justice, which no poet of his generation can match.”
