The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse: With Editor Sunil Iyengar and Contributors Mary Jo Salter and David Yezzi

Bird in Hand is delighted to host an event featuring The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse, a new anthology edited by Sunil Iyengar, who will join us to moderate the event. Contributing poets Mary Jo Salter and David Yezzi will offer a reading to celebrate this exciting new volume, which reconnects narrative verse, or poems that tell a story, to a contemporary readership.

The new book presents a wide range of specimens from twenty-eight poets who were born since World War II and who published their narrative poems over the past fifty years. Anecdote, fable, myth, biography, thriller, Western, ghost story—these are among the many different genres of tale collected by poet-critic Sunil Iyengar.

Books will be available for sale at the event.

Sunil Iyengar is editor of The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse and author of a poetry chapbook, A Call from the Shallows. Samples of his published writings can be found at www.suniliyengar.com. He lives outside Washington, D.C., where he works as an arts research director.

Mary Jo Salter is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Cameo Appearance, forthcoming from Knopf this year. She is professor emerita in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins.

David Yezzi’s latest books are More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems (Measure Press) and Late Romance: Anthony Hecht—A Poet’s Life (St. Martin’s Press). A current Guggenheim Fellow, he is a member of the acting company at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company in Baltimore. He teaches at Johns Hopkins.