Poet and Princeton resident Keith O’Shaughnessy will present a reading from his latest work, Petrushka. An audience Q&A and signing will follow.
Set in a quasi-Russian dreamscape, the blackly comic, darkly beautiful poems and fables contained in this vast volume chronicle, in an elaborate symphonic arrangement of recurring themes and motifs, the miscellaneous travails of several interacting characters—ballerina, chess master, opera tenor, cabaret chanteuse (if not, too, the odd street urchin, idiot, or organ grinder)—all under the vigilant glare of the gleefully belligerent, aggressively indecorous Petrushka puppet thwacking away savagely at his various adversaries with his signature slapstick. By turns elegant, satirical, and absurd, the collection, like its namesake, revels throughout in the perverse and grotesque, yet always with mischievous wit and rhetorical invention.