About "Last Lake": In his tenth book of poems, Reginald Gibbons immerses the reader in many different places and moments of intensity, including a lake in the Canadian north, a neighborhood in Chicago, the poet Osip Mandelshtam’s midnight of social cataclysm and imagination, a horse caravan in Texas, and an archeological dig on the steppes near the Volga River. "Last Lake" begins with a cougar and ends with bees; it speaks in two ways—with reminiscence, meditation, and memorial, and with springing leaps of image and thought.
About Reginald Gibbons: Reginald Gibbons is Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. His poetry collections include National Book Award finalist "Creatures of a Day" and "Slow Trains Overhead": Chicago Poems and Stories, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.
About "Life Pig": Alan Shapiro’s newest book of poetry is situated at the intersection between private and public history, as well as individual life and the collective life of middle-class America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether writing about an aged and dying parent or remembering incidents from childhood and adolescence, Shapiro attends to the world in ways that are as deeply personal as they are recognizable and freshly social—both timeless and utterly of this particular moment.
About Alan Shapiro: Alan Shapiro has published many books, including "Reel to Reel," a Pulitzer Prize finalist. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A new collection of essays, "That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration," is also available this fall from the University of Chicago Press.