Library Book Club

All experience levels are welcome to a monthly book group moderated by library staff. In 2013, the library will ask individuals from varied backgrounds to select a title that has been meaningful to them. Space is limited to 15 participants. Please register in advance by emailing [email protected].
 
January’s curator, Jayne Anne Phillips, selected Irene McKinney’s Unthinkable: Selected Poems for the following reasons:
 
“Irene McKinney's Unthinkable: Selected Poems, represents three decades of direct, forceful, vernacular work addressed to us, her readers and listeners. McKinney's poems embody the rhythms of speech, not written discourse, and her themes are timeless connection with the land, with seasons and animals, with people, with loss and grief and joy. Like Wislawa Szymborska or Ruth Stone, McKinney is an independent spirit powered by clarity and compassion. Grounded in Appalachian history, geography, and custom, her poems draw on a wide range of poetic and spiritual traditions and tell truths we immediately recognize as universal. McKinney, a major American poet, is represented here in the breadth and depth of her achievement. Unthinkable is a revelation."
 
Jayne Anne Phillips' most recent novel, Lark and Termite, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the NBCC Award, won the Heartland Prize. An English Professor at Rutgers-Newark, she directs the Rutgers Newark MFA Program and the Writers@Newark Reading Series.