Four Poets: A Reading

Albert Goldbarth is the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, including Everyday People, To Be Read in 500 Years, and The Kitchen Sink. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. In Selfish (Graywolf Press), Goldbarth explores our current climate of narcissism in poems that are accessible, funny, and emotional. He is one of the widest-ranging poets at work, and in Selfish his range is on full display, with references to celebrity culture, Charles Darwin, sex shops, science fiction, ancient cave art, comic books, and the fates of many family and friends.

Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.  His eight books of poems include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose:  Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast, Firebird and Dog Years, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007. Doty is also the author of The Art of Description, a handbook for writers. Doty's work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In his latest collection, Deep Lane: Poems (W.W. Norton), Doty finds transcendence in both the mundane and the grievous.

Mary Jo Bang, who teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of six previous books of poetry, including Elegy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also published a celebrated translation of Dante's Inferno. Her latest collection, The Last Two Seconds (Graywolf Press), captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the twenty-first century.

Yusef Komunyakaa's books of poetry include Neon Vernacular (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize), Talking Dirty to the Gods, Taboo, Warhorses, The Chameleon Couch, and Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally and include Wakonda's Dream, Saturnalia, Testimony, and Gilgamesh (a verse play). In The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Komunyakaa’s brings his jazz-inflected rhythms and his effortlessly surreal images to this celebration of natural beauty and of love. There is also his insistent inquiry into the structures and struggles of power: not only of, say, king against jester but of man against his own desire and of the present against the pernicious influence of the past. David Wojahn has called Komunyakaa one of our "most significant and individual voices…"