Virtual Event: Frank Bidart

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series is thrilled to welcome Pulitzer Prize–winning poet FRANK BIDART for a discussion of his latest, highly anticipated poetry collection, Against Silence. He will be joined in conversation by GARTH GREENWELL, celebrated author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness.

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About Against Silence

Words, images reek of the worlds from which they

emerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable

aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise.

Words—a gap, nonetheless always and forever,

between words and the world—

slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish.

Set up a situation,—

. . . then reveal an abyss.

For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eleventh collection of poetry, he urges others to join the chorus. Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa, but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls forth—with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.

Praise for Against Silence

"Frank Bidart is a gift—we are lucky to have had him writing poetry for a half century. Against Silence is his eleventh collection, and continues his lifelong navigation of the uncertain spaces between haunting and love, and the fertile gap between words and the world." —Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub

"Another memorable contribution to Bidart's oeuvre." —Publishers Weekly