Renowned American poet Brian Turner will deliver a public reading at Colby-Sawyer College on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024, from 4 to 5 p.m. in the Archives of the Susan Colgate Cleveland Library). The reading is free.

An award-winning poet, memoirist and musician, Turner will read from his most recent trilogy of books: The Wild Delight of Wild Things (2023), The Goodbye World Poem (2023) and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook (2023), which spool threads of life back and forth, punctuated by loss and wonder. From reflections on the loss of his beloved wife, Turner expands his thematic exploration through the loss of biodiversity to the loss of the world as we know it through daily environmental disasters. His poems resonate with Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s moral imperative to “praise the mutilated world.”

 “We can all benefit from Turner’s inspiration to, as Blake said, ‘see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,’” School of Arts & Sciences Professor and M. Roy London Endowed Chair Ewa Chrusciel said. “It will be a unique gift for our students to encounter Brian Turner in person, as they study his poetry in the Visions of Nature course. Turner’s visions are like paper lanterns ’holding infinity.’ Turner’s poems oscillate between grief and bewilderment, feelings so poignant and intertwined that we feel we are witnessing the act of creation, always at the verge of revelation. Mexican-American poet Luis Alberto Urrea wrote about Turner’s trilogy, ’Luminous, haunting and gorgeous, Brian Turner’s new collection can change how we see this wounded world. It’s an act of grace.’”

Turner is the author of five collections of poetry, including Here, Bullet (2005), winner of the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, The New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, the 2006 PEN Center USA Best in the West award and the 2007 Poets Prize; and Phantom Noise (2010). He is also the author of the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country, which made Powell’s Best Nonfiction of 2014 list.

Turner’s poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic and Harper’s, among many other distinct journals. His work was also featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was nominated for an Academy Award. In addition to his Guggenheim Fellowship, he has received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize and a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. His poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Swedish and more. He lives in Orlando, Florida, with his dog, Dene. Visit the author’s website at https://brianturner.org.