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. April’s selection is Sturge Town by acclaimed poet Kwame Dawes. In this stunning volume, Dawes explores the mythic, ancestral, and spiritual journeys that make up a life.
We will meet in person in the loft at our store at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $27, which includes a copy of Sturge Town to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
About the book:
The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes’s family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality. Metrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualized spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.
Kwame Dawes is the author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. Dawes is a George W. Holmes University Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner. He is a chancellor emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Dawes is the winner of the Windham-Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022, Kwame Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
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All signed up and unable to go? Please let us know! Seating is limited and there may be people on our waitlist who would like to to take your place. Please send an email to [email protected] ASAP and hopefully we'll see you next time.
Click to go to the Bookstore1 Sarasota website.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Bookstore1Sarasota, 117 S. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, United States
USD 28.89
