Prizewinning Ohio poet to read for Language Arts Live

The Language Arts Live series of literary readings at Bates College presents Brian Brodeur, author of three prizewinning volumes of poetry, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 17, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Admission is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6256. The Language Arts Live series is sponsored by the English department and the John Tagliabue Fund at Bates.

Brodeur is the author of Natural Causes (Autumn House Press, 2012), which won the 2011 Autumn House Poetry Prize; Other Latitudes (University of Akron Press, 2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize; and So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 2007), which won the Fall 2006 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Poetry Chapbook Award.

He is the Elliston Fellow in Poetry in the English and comparative literature doctoral program at the University of Cincinnati. Brodeur’s poems and reviews have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Margie — The American Journal of Poetry, The Missouri Review, Verse Daily, The Minnesota Review and Pleiades.

Brodeur became a poet in order to connect with other people, he says, and his “aim is that the verbal contraption of the poem reproduces within the reader the emotional and intellectual experience the poem renders.”

He says, “poetry for me begins in pleasure. I keep reading, writing and thinking about poetry because of the unique pleasures these activities afford. Nothing — not fiction, TV or parasailing — fill the hole in the belly like this craft or sullen art.”