Patrick Barron and David Blair

Patrick Barron grew up in the Pacific Northwest, lived in Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, and Italy for a number of years, and is now based in Boston, where he teaches at the University of Massachusetts. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in various journals. His most recent books are Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), A Edition, by Gianni Celati (2019) and The Agropastoral Landscape of the Majella National Park (2019).

He will be reading from his forthcoming book Spooring, a collection of poems and short prose passages written during a walk down the Apennines in central Italy over the course of a number of months and inspired in part by Robert Smithson’s idea that “language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody’s head,” but also the corollary–that the physical world can find itself in language.

David Blair is the author of three books of poetry, Ascension Days, Friends with Dogs, and Arsonville. He is also the author of Walk Around: Essays on Poetry and Place and a forthcoming poetry collection, Barbarian Seasons, both from MadHat Press.

He will be reading selections from his new collections of essays Walk Around and his forthcoming collection of poems Barbarian Seasons  that show some of the central concerns of his work with people and the communities we find in place.