LITERATURE + LECTURES

Brazos Bookstore is pleased to present Paul Otremba & Catherine Bowman.

Paul Otremba's poems and criticism have appeared in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, The Kenyon Review, Lyric, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Tikkun and Virginia Quarterly Review. He has won scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship, and an Academy of American Poets prize. He is a former employee of Brazos Bookstore and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Houston.

The finely-sculpted poems of The Currency animate the world of art and architecture, from Caravaggio and Frank Gehry to the contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan and the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Limosin. Exploring such works of art for how they lead us to pause for thought and breath -- how they infuse mind and body in equal measure, helping us keep and pass the time we spend -- Otremba poignantly articulates the hues of familial life.

Catherine Bowman (pictured) is the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University and the author of the poetry collections Notarikon (Four Way Books 2005), Rock Farm, and 1-800-HOTRIBS. Bowman received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Poetry and her poems have appeared in six editions of The Best American Poetry.

She lives in Bloomington. Part homage, part exploration, The Plath Cabinet offers a new window onto Sylvia Plath's world, from her hand-made dolls and her passport to a preserved lock of her hair. The Plath Cabinet is not simply an unparalleled biography: it is a memoir in poems, telling the story of Bowman's relationship to Plath and to poetry. The Plath Cabinet is a must-read for Plath-lovers, for anyone interested in memoir and biography, and for all readers of contemporary poetry.