Reading by Touring Poet Todd Boss, sponsored by The Georgia Review and the Georgia Poetry Circuit

On Wednesday, February 1, the second of three Georgia Poetry Circuit events for the 2011-12 academic year will feature nationally known poet Todd Boss in a program beginning at 7 p.m. at Cine, 234 West Hancock Avenue in downtown Athens. 

Local writer and UGA graduate student Jeff Fallis will open. GPC readings are  sponsored locally by The Georgia Review—one of the nation’s premier literary quarterlies, founded at the University of Georgia in 1947. This event is free and open to the public.

Boss’s work is “never pretentious but always acrobatic, sensuous, technically inventive, muscular and fun,” says poet Tony Hoagland; acclaimed writer Sherman Alexie says that Boss “can make any rhyme feel like a concealed weapon.”

Todd Boss grew up in poverty on an 80-acre cattle farm in Wisconsin. His debut poetry collection, Yellowrocket (W. W. Norton, 2008) will be followed next month by Pitch, also from Norton. His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Poetry, The London Times, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry. Boss’s libretto Panic, a verse retelling of Knut Hamsun’s Pan, will premiere this winter. He is a co-founder of Motionpoems, a new poetry film initiative now developing a dozen poetry films in collaboration with Scribner’s Best American Poetry 2011. He lives in Saint Paul with his wife and children.

Jeff Fallis’ poems have appeared in publications such as Ploughshares, The Oxford American, The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, and RealPoetik, and in the anthologies Blues Poems and The Art of Losing.  He has held a residency in poetry at the Vermont Studio Center and was recently nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize.

Books by Todd Boss will be available for sale courtesy of Byhalia Books.

The third and final Georgia Poetry Circuit reading of 2011-12 will feature Dave Smith on April 2. The Georgia Review is also sponsoring a reading by two-time National Book Critics Circle Award winner. Albert Goldbarth on April 4. For more information call 706/542-3481 or visit thegeorgiareview.com.