Memoirs & Coffee Book Group to Discuss "The Pawnbroker's Daughter"

The next meeting of Bernardsville Public Library’s book discussion group, Memoirs and Coffee, will be held on Tuesday, April 26 at 10:30 am in the library’s Community Room. Manager Pat Kennedy-Grant will lead the discussion of "The Pawnbroker’s Daughter" (2015) by the late Maxine Kumin. Attendees are also encouraged to read a selection of her poems.

Kumin left an unrivaled legacy as a pioneering poet and feminist. “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter” charts her journey from a childhood in a Jewish community in Depression-era Philadelphia, where Kumin’s father was a pawnbroker, to Radcliffe College, where she comes into her own as an intellectual and meets the soldier-turned-Los Alamos scientist who would become her husband; to her metamorphosis from a poet of “light verse” to a “poet of witness”; to her farm in rural New England, the subject and setting of much of her later work.

Against all odds, Kumin channeled her dissatisfaction with the life that is expected of her as a wife and a mother into her work as a feminist and one of the most renowned and remembered twentieth-century American poets.
There is no charge and no registration is needed to join the discussion. Call the library at 766-0118 for more information.