Poetry Tonight!

Please join us for a reading from two recent Crab Orchard Series in Poetry collections by

Jesse Lee Kercheval (Cinema Muto)
& Alison Townsend (Persephone in America)
Thursday, April 16, 7:00 PM
6191 Helen C. White

“This miraculous work—each poem a transformation of script into story, silent film into loud life—is the one book you MUST read this year.”
— Hilda Raz

Jesse Lee Kercheval is the award-winning author of The Alice Stories and Space: a Memoir. She is the Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin and director of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

“Persephone in America is a magnificent book. Alison Townsend poignantly and sometimes shockingly blends reimagined myth with reinvented autobiography. Persephone, the abducted daughter of a goddess, is a would-be Barbie, a wild one, a flirt, an innocent, a rape victim, a cutter, a bulimic, a young poet, a girl who misses her mother, an artist’s model, a girl who loves to dance, a depressive, a married woman who has an abortion, and more. . . . This is what revisionist mythology is all about: the sacred and the demonic still alive in our time.”
—Alicia Ostriker

Alison Townsend is an associate professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She is the author of And Still the Music, What the Body Knows, and The Blue Dress: Poems and Prose Poems.