Sandy Tseng & Alicia Ostriker

Thursday, September 30, 7pm – Poetry

Sandy Tseng & Alicia Ostriker

Sandy Tseng author of Sediment ($15.95 Four Way Books)
In Sandy Tseng’s first collection, leaving is both what remains and the act of going to another place, a different lifestyle, an unknown afterlife. This book recounts the pleasures and terrors of transition, of being “in between languages.” We travel with Tseng, learning that the sediment of our lives–received traditions, half-recalled memories, accrued possessions–might also be fragments by which we recognize a future life, here or elsewhere. Among SANDY TSENG’S awards are the 2006 Discovery / The Nation Award, Crab Orchard Review’s 2005 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, and scholarships from the Vira I. Heinz Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker author of The Book of Seventy ($14.95 University of Pittsburgh Press)
Alicia Ostriker seizes the opportunity to take us where too few poets have been able to take us: into a domain of what our fabulists like to call the “golden years.” as we live longer, we become inevitably curious about the actual texture of these late years, curious about what happens in the soul. Out of that curiosity is a new kind of poetry born, an elderstile that has passion and irony, wisdom, folly, clarity and tenderness. In her keen engagement with the self and the world, Ostriker offers us a voice and a perspective that explore the territory of seventy and beyond. Alicia Suskin Ostriker is the author of eleven previous poetry collections, including: The Mother/Child Papers; No Heaven; the volcano sequence; and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. Ostirker is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of Drew University.