Join us for a tranquil winter Saturday afternoon of new poetry with Sarah Arvio, author of Night Thoughts (Knopf, 2013) and Ernest Hilbert, author of All of You on the Good Earth (Red Red Hen Press, 2013), sponsored by Random Name Poetry Series.

Penn Book Center, University of Pennsylvania Campus, 30 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Located at the Corner of 34th Street and Sansom Street
Phone: (215) 222-7600
Saturday, February 1st, 2PM

FREE!

Click here for the FaceBook event page. Please feel free to invite others! We hope to see you there.

Sarah Arvio’s latest book is Night Thoughts: 70 Dream Poems & Notes from an Analysis, a hybrid work made up of poetry, essay, and memoir, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Her earlier books of poems are Visits from the Seventh and Sono: Cantos, also published by Knopf. She has won the Rome Prize and received Bogliasco and Guggenheim fellowships. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has also taught poetry at Princeton. She now lives in Maryland, by the Chesapeake Bay. Click here to read an interview with Sarah Arvio in the LA Review of Books.

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“forsythia” by Sarah Arvio

here’s a dream about my mother there are
three black smokestacks in a black night sky
belching black smoke & yellow sparks &
as the sparks land beyond the black river
they are yellow forsythia blossoms
cynthia was my mother so ha ha
we said for cynthia for cynthia
to the great bush of flaming yellow sparks
only now years later I say for sin
then incinerator for the barrel
where I burned up my sins I had tried to
insinuate myself into her thoughts
but no luck they were elsewhere but why
three black smokestacks & why the black river

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Ernest Hilbert is the author of two collections of poetry, Sixty Sonnets and All of You on the Good Earth, as well as a spoken word album recorded with rock band and orchestra, Elegies & Laments, available from Pub Can Records. He hosts the popular blog E-Verse (www.everseradio.com) and the E-Verse Equinox Reading Series at Fergie’s Pub. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, Verse, New Criterion, American Scholar, and the London Review as well as in a number of anthologies, including The Incredible Sestinas Anthology (2013), The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, and two Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology (2011). He works at Bauman Rare Books in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife Lynn Makowsky, the Keeper of the Mediterranean Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

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“Dredge” by Ernest Hilbert

Is this the end of fulcrum, wheel, and pulley?
Gains or loss issue from plan and man-hour,
Herds bred, coasts moved, pure momentum and mass.
Calls cough through. Gas pumps plentifully.
Wealth permits them to raise, to tend, to scour.
Landfills swell into hills bearded by grass,
Power lines profiled against the sunset
Like ships’ rigging in a crowded anchorage.
Are we merely barnacled to such commerce?
We make corrections, rest, and hit reset,
Lounge in the sun and watch the harbor dredge.
Can so much pure force ever know reverse?
What would replace it? Suckled shark spine, shard,
Fist clenched and unclenched. Overfed graveyard.