Reading and Discussion with Reginald Gibbons and Ed Roberson

"What I most admire about this book by Reginald Gibbons is how it demonstrates what is, for me, most truly innovative about the short prose form—that is, not merely the strategies of the form itself, but where these unpredictable pieces can take you. Through their lens, Gibbons has arrived at what seems an effortless emotional directness and a voice that is extraordinary for its intense intimacy." —Stuart Dybek
“In poems that proceed snakelike across a page or in traditional flush-left frames, Roberson's images and ideas are starling and complex, often difficult in their dreamlike qualities. His lines have been accurately described as syntactically double-jointed and labyrinthine—and, as with any maze, readers must find a hold an outside wall to guide them through Roberson's sometimes surreal vision of the earth. That 'hold' may be the earth itself….” — Karla Huston, Library Journal
Reginald Gibbons and Ed Roberson read and discuss their new works, An Orchard in the Street and To See the Earth Before the End of the World.
At the Co-op
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About An Orchard in the Street: This collection of brief fictions by award-winning author Reginald Gibbons explores human experience and memory in ordinary settings—city apartments, rural roads, soap operas, and juvenile court—as a way to understand the depths of thought and feeling in our everyday encounters. These narrative meditations explode with imagery, looking and listening deeply into our everyday experience—the extraordinary within the ordinary, the impossible within the possible.
About To See the Earth Before the End of the World: In To See the Earth Before the End of the World, Ed Roberson presents us with 120 new poems, each speaking in his unique voice and seen through his unique eye. Earth and sky, neighborhood life and ancient myths, the art of seeing and the architecture of the imagination are all among the subjects of these poems. Recurring images and ideas construct a complex picture of our world, ourselves, and the manifold connections tying them together. The poems raise large questions about the natural world and our place in it, and they do not flinch from facing up to those questions.
Roberson’s poems range widely through different scales of time and space, invoking along the way history and myth, galaxies and garbage trucks, teapots and the history of photography, mating cranes and Chicago's political machine. This collection is composed of five sequences, each developing a particular constellation of images and ideas related to the vision of the whole. Various journeys become one journey—an epic journey, invoking epic themes. There are songs of creation, pictures of the sorrows of war, celebrations of human labor and human society, a respect for tools and domestic utensils that are well made, the deep background of the past tingeing the colors of the present, and the tragic tones of endings and laments, a pervading awareness of the tears in things. Most of all, there is the exhilaration of a grand, sweeping vision that enlarges our world.
About Reginald Gibbons: Reginald Gibbons is the author most recently of How Poems Think (criticism; Chicago), Last Lake (poems; Chicago), and An Orchard in the Street (fiction; BOA Editions). His Creatures of a Day was a Finalist for the National Book Award in poetry. He is a Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University.
About Ed Roberson: Ed Roberson is the author of eight books of poetry. He is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and his prior books have won the Iowa Poetry Prize and the National Poetry Series. Having retired from Rutgers University, Roberson currently lives in Chicago where he has taught at Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago.
Related Titles
This new collection by award-winning author Reginald Gibbons explores human experience and memory in ordinary settings--city apartments, rural roads, soap operas, and juvenile court--as way to understand the depths of thought and feeling in our everyday encounters. These narrative meditations...
Generous, visionary new work by this major American poet
Winner of the Voelcker Award (PEN America) (2016)
In To See the Earth Before the End of the World Ed Roberson presents us with 120 new poems, each speaking in his unique voice and seen through his unique...