GAINESVILLE - Brenau University will host a poetry reading by nationally renowned writer Noah Blaustein on Monday, Feb. 2 at 12:30 p.m. in Banks Recital Hall at the John S. Burd Center for the Performing Arts. <br />
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His presentation is part of his tour on the Georgia Poetry Circuit, a consortium of ten Georgia colleges and universities working together to bring three poets of national and international reputation yearly to the participating colleges' campuses. After his poetry reading, Blaustein will follow up with a Q & A session at Brenau's Writing Center in the Trustee Library at 3:30 p.m.<br />
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Blaustein's first book of poems, Flirt, was selected by Kevin Prufer for the 2013 Mary Buritt Christiansen poetry series, and the anthology he edited, Motion: American Sports Poems, was an Editor's Pick of National Public Radio and a Librarian's Pick of the New York Public Library. He has published poems in Zyzzyva, the Massachusetts Review, the Harvard Review, Barrow Street, Poetry Daily, The Fish Anthology, Orion, Pleiades and many other journals. He lives in Santa Monica, California with his wife and kids.<br />
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In an interview with the Los Angeles Times about Motion: American Sports Poems, Blaustein spoke about his love of sports and poetry-two spheres that most people don't perceive as fitting together-and how poetry captures the rhythm of sports. "Because of its immediacy, poetry puts you inside the facts," he said. "It puts emotion to numbers. In sports, you're constantly trying to re-create these heightened moments. A good poem, by its very nature, has a way of locking that in permanently. You can return to it, see what you saw the first time with the same amount of power, and then see it differently, again and again." <br />
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Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Chameleon Couch and Warhorses, described Blaustein's Flirt as "playfully deceptive. Whether flirting with 'the weird' or pop songs, Venice Beach culture, love, death, or modern anxiety, the voice here is ontological and always grounded."<br />
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For more information about the Georgia Poetry Circuit, visit www.berry.edu/gpc or call 770-534-6195.<br />
