New and Selected Poems, 1975-2017, a Poetry Reading & Signing
Eleanor Wilner is the author of seven previous collections of poetry and winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. She will read from and sign Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2017 . Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Wilner, along with selections from her seven previous books. Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change.
In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry’s lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.
About the Author
Eleanor Wilner is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, most recently Tourist in Hell and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair. In 2019, she received the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, the highest award presented by the Poetry Society of America. Her other awards include the Juniper Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, and her work appears in many anthologies, including The Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in Philadelphia.