Women’s Poetry Initiative at St. Francis College to host acclaimed poet

 

Grace Schulman. Photo by Nancy Crampton
Grace Schulman. Photo by Nancy Crampton

According to Brooklyn Eagle, on Oct. 30, the Women’s Poetry Initiative at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights will host the inaugural event in its Fall Reading Series with the poet Grace Schulman reading from her new collection, “Without a Claim” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Schulman’s seventh collection of poems, “Without a Claim” navigates the boundaries between times past and present, cultures distant and close to home, highlighting the complex relationship we each have with the notion of ownership — from the tangible objects and places we live among, to our emotions and sense of self which, though incorporeal, we clutch to ourselves just as jealously.

Schulman uses the vivid imagery of art, faith, music and history that we have seen and loved to explore the way we seldom entirely own that which we cling to. Around us, places, traditions, people change without our permission, jarring us from this sense of possession — only in art in all its forms and lingering impressions does Schulman find a sense of stillness and perpetuity. The search for balance between what we own and what owns us brings Schulman inspiration and joy: “I marvel at the beauty of incompleteness . . . hinting at a world of things unbroken.”

The Oct. 30 reading begins at 4:30 p.m. in Founders Hall at St. Francis College, and will be followed by a small reception.

Grace Schulman is the author of seven acclaimed books of poetry, including “Days of Wonder”, a finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Award. The editor of “The Poems of Marianne Moore”, she is a distinguished professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

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