Poetry Reading & Conversation with Boris Dralyuk & Adam Kirsch

133 North Larchmont Boulevard,Los Angeles CA 90004

12 September, 2022

Description

Masks Required. ABOUT THE BOOKS In these moving and meditative poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks--from Devo to Atari to the Challenger disaster--to tell a story of emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are. My Hollywood and Other Poems is a collection of lyric meditations on the experience of émigrés in Los Angeles. In forms ranging from ballades to villanelles to Onegin sonnets, the poems pursue the sublime in a tarnished landscape, seek continuity and mourn its loss in a town where change is the only constant. My Hollywood draws on the poet's own life as a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, honors the vanishing traces of the city's past, and, in crisp and poignant translations, summons the voices of five Russian poets who spent their final years in LA, including the composer Vernon Duke. ABOUT THE POETS Adam Kirsch is the author of "The Discarded Life" (Red Hen Press) and three other collections of poetry, as well several books of literary history and criticism, including "The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature" and "Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas." A native of Los Angeles, he lives in New York where he is an editor at the Wall Street Journal. Boris Dralyuk is the editor in chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution and Ten Poems from Russia, and translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. His poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere, and his criticism and translations have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker, among other venues. His collection My Hollywood and Other Poems appeared from Paul Dry Books in 2022. Notes on parking in Larchmont Village: Chevalier's does not have any parking, but there is paid meter parking on the street, a paid lot next to the bank, and free street parking parallel the Larchmont Blvd. on Lucerne Blvd.