Poets Duy Doan and Ben Purkert to Read at Concord Library

Acclaimed younger poets Duy Doan and Ben Purkert will read from their arresting debut collections in the Concord Poetry at the Library Series on Sunday, March 25, 2018 at 3:00 p.m., followed by a Question and Answer period and book signings with light refreshments. The event will take place at the Main Library (129 Main Street). All are welcomed to this free event sponsored by the Friends of the Library.

Duy Doan is the winner of the 2017 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected for his collection, We Play A Game. This striking debut reveals the wide resonance of the book’s unassuming title, in poems that explore—now with abundant humor, now with a deeply felt reserve—the ambiguities and tensions that mark our effort to know our histories, our loved ones, and ourselves. These are poems that draw from Doan’s experience as a Vietnamese-American while at the same time making a case for—and masterfully playing with—the fluidity of identity, history, and language. Doan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Slate, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, Doan received an MFA in poetry from Boston University where he serves as director of the Favorite Poem Project.

Ben Purkert’s debut collection, For the Love of Endings (Four Way Books), tests what connects us to this earth and to each other. Light-footed and dark-humored, his brilliantly crafted poems examine “the gap / between the world & how / people paint it: dark, distant, there / for the taking.” He makes us look at our disintegrating world head on and see what we’ve done to it, and what it has done to us. Purkert teaches creative writing at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. His poems and essays have appeared in Agni, Boston Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds degrees from Harvard and NYU, where he was a New York Times Fellow.