Dan Chiasson

reads from

Bicentennial:
Poems

Co-sponsored by Mass Poetry and Woodberry Poetry Room

This event includes a book signing

Date

Mar
13
Thursday
March 13, 2014
7:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store, Mass Poetry, and Woodberry Poetry Room are pleased to welcome poet and Pushcart Prize winner DAN CHIASSON for a reading of his latest poetry collection, Bicentennial

A refreshing, singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning.
 
Bicentennial summons the world of Chiasson’s seventies childhood in Vermont: early VCRs, snow, erections, pizza, snowmobiles, high-school cliques, and the Bicentennial celebration; but his book is also an elegy for his father, whom he never knew and who died in 2009. In these poems, Chiasson movingly revisits the kind of autobiographical poems he wrote as a young man, but with a new existential awareness that individuals are always vanishing in time, and throughout the collection he ponders time’s conundrums. “All of history, even the Romans, / they happen later, tonight sleep tight,” he tells his sons at bedtime. “You’ll learn this later. Tonight, goodnight.” In the topsy-turvy world of Bicentennial, history has both happened and is waiting to happen; boys grow up to be men; men never forget what it is to be boys; and fatherhood is the best answer to fatherlessness.

Dan Chiasson
Dan Chiasson

Dan Chiasson

Dan Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont, and was educated at Amherst College and Harvard University, where he completed a Ph.D. in English. His first book of poems, The Afterlife of Objects, was published in 2002. A widely published literary critic, Chiasson is the author of One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and teaches at Amherst and Wellesley colleges. He lives in Sherborn, Massachusetts.

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes

As you exit the station, reverse your direction and walk east along Mass. Ave. in front of the Cambridge Savings Bank. Cross Dunster St. and proceed along Mass. Ave for three more blocks. You will pass Au Bon Pain, JP Licks, and TD Bank. Harvard Book Store is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Plympton St.

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Event Series: The Road to Poetry Month

Harvard Book Store is anticipating National Poetry Month in April with a series of events this March. The Road to Poetry Month series includes events with poets Kevin Young and Dan Chiasson as well as biographer Susan Cheever for her new book on the life of E. E. Cummings.

Event Co-Sponsor(s)

Mass Poetry: http://masspoetry.org/
Woodberry Poetry Room: http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/

Purchase the Book
Featured event books will be for sale at the event for 20% off. Thank you for supporting this author series with your purchases.
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