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HomeEventsAPSU Visiting Writers Series opens October 11th with poet Helena Mesa

APSU Visiting Writers Series opens October 11th with poet Helena Mesa

Austin Peay State UniversityClarksville, TN – This year’s Austin Peay State University’s Visiting Writers Series begins October 11th with Cuban-American poet Helena Mesa reading from her work at 4:00pm in the Honors Commons.

The event, sponsored by Austin Peay’s Creative Writing Program and the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts, is free and open to the public.

Helena Mesa is the author of “Horse Dance Under Water” and a co-editor of “Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to POets”. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Poet Lore, Indiana Review, and other journals.

She lives in Ann Arbor and is an associate professor of English at Albion College.

Praise for “Horse Dance Underwater”

‘Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,’ Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa’s poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut. —Mark Doty, Winner of 2008 National Book Award for Poetry

The poems in Helena Mesa’s virtuosic first book, Horse Dance Underwater, run with such speed, verve, and alacrity they leave you breathless, exhilarated, and transformed as if the purest kind of song had lifted you into the air. By this quickness of language finding lyric speech, Mesa’s poems remind us of art’s joyous and ecstatic effects. —Michael Collier, author of Dark Wild Realm and co-editor of The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology

‘The world tilts in strange guises. Behold these, love these,’ Helena Mesa writes at the end of a long journey. I am moved by her notes to saints, by the way she limns the distance between strangers, by her quest for a sacred grove. There is a deep aura of solitude in this splendid first book. —Edward Hirsch

The poetry reading is at 4:00pm October 11th at the Honors Commons. Mark it on your calendars and stop in to hear this wonderful poet read from her works.

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