About this Event
This monthly book club, led by Doug Knowlton, is for those who like to read and discuss poetry. It celebrates the integral role of poets and poetry in life and literature. June's selection is Into the Hush by Arthur Sze - a finalist for the 2026 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Like wind on a lake, U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze's twelfth book of poetry extends a language that ripples and stills, conjuring a cast of fruit trees and gunshots, butterflies and chemistry, animals and man.
We meet in person in the loft of our store in The Mark building at 117 South Pineapple Avenue. The cost is your purchase of the book ($23), which can be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Drawing on a craft honed over decades of writing, these poems earn their profound simplicity, moving with imaginative power and emotional force. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of our nuclear age—endangered cultures and the exigencies of climate change—exploring what it means to write on a planet struggling against anthropocene, to “make lines/against a void.” Here poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun and ekphrastic, epistle and twin pantoums. Poems borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak. Writing at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark publication. Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence. Repeatedly, we find cause for praise.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Arthur Sze is the twenty-fifth Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of twelve books of poetry, including (2021), selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize; (2019), for which he received the National Book Award; (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; (2005); (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and (1995), selected for an American Book Award. He has also published (2024) and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). In 2025, he published The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems with the Museum of New Mexico Press.
A recipient of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship, as well as five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Bookstore1Sarasota, 117 S. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, United States
USD 26.90
