Billy Collins

Harvard Book Store is thrilled to welcome former Poet Laureate BILLY COLLINS for a reading from his newest collection of poetry, Horoscopes for the Dead.

Billy Collins is widely acknowledged as a prominent player at the table of modern American poetry. In this new collection, Horoscopes for the Dead, the verbal gifts that earned him the title “America’s most popular poet” are on full display. The poems here cover the usual but everlasting themes of love and loss, life and death, youth and aging, solitude and union. With simple diction and turns of phrase, Collins is at once ironic and elegiac, as in the opening lines of the title poem:
 
Every morning since you disappeared for good,
I read about you in the newspaper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.
Some days I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you . . .
 
And in this reflection on his own transience:
 
It doesn’t take much to remind me
what a mayfly I am,
what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.
Standing under the bones of a dinosaur
in a museum does the trick every time
or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.

“It is difficult not to be charmed by Collins, and that in itself is a remarkable literary accomplishment.”—The New York Review of Books

Tickets for this event are now sold out. Tickets purchased online or by phone are currently available for pick-up at Harvard Book Store. Copies of Horoscopes for the Dead will be available for pick-up beginning April 5, and will be available the day of the event. Please note that tickets only guarantee a seat until 3:45pm on Sunday, April 10. The rest of the store will remain open to the public throughout the reading.

Customers who wish to join the signing line but who have not purchased tickets must show a proof of purchase of Horoscopes for the Dead from Harvard Book Store. Any additional signing rules will be updated as soon as they are confirmed.