Susan Howe and Kate Colby
Readings in Contemporary Poetry
Monday 11 February, 2013
6:30pm, $6
Dia: Chelsea
535 West 22 Street, Floor 5
Susan Howe was born in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books of poems and two volumes of criticism. Her most recent poetry collections are The Midnight (2003), Kidnapped (2002), The Europe of Trusts (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996), The Nonconformist's Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), and Singularities (1990).
Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson (1985).
Colby grew up in Massachusetts, graduated from Wesleyan University in 1996, and earned an MFA in creative writing from California College of the Arts. Her collections of poetry include Fruitlands (2006), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, Unbecoming Behavior (2008), and Beauport (2010).
Wary of easy similes and life summaries, Colby writes poems in Unbecoming Behavior that are based on the biography of the writer Jane Bowles. Denise Dooley, reviewing the book for galatea resurrection, described it as a “project of spliced sound, color, and ventriloquized experience.†In other poems, Colby has incorporated accounts of Isadora Duncan, Anna Anderson, Catherine de Medici, Sarah Winchester, and the Transcendentalist community at Fruitlands as she recontextualizes these accounts within personal details and writings on the contemporary world.
Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson (1985).
Colby grew up in Massachusetts, graduated from Wesleyan University in 1996, and earned an MFA in creative writing from California College of the Arts. Her collections of poetry include Fruitlands (2006), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, Unbecoming Behavior (2008), and Beauport (2010).
Wary of easy similes and life summaries, Colby writes poems in Unbecoming Behavior that are based on the biography of the writer Jane Bowles. Denise Dooley, reviewing the book for galatea resurrection, described it as a “project of spliced sound, color, and ventriloquized experience.†In other poems, Colby has incorporated accounts of Isadora Duncan, Anna Anderson, Catherine de Medici, Sarah Winchester, and the Transcendentalist community at Fruitlands as she recontextualizes these accounts within personal details and writings on the contemporary world.