PAUL VANGELISTI READS FROM HIS LATEST COLLECTION OF POETRY BORDER MUSIC

Border Music (Talisman House)

Border Music is Paul Vangelisti’s thirty-third book of poetry, bringing together work from the last ten years, in sundry forms from the personal lyric, to alphabet poems, to longer collage and hybrid projects, to musically inspired acrostics. Some of these poems first appeared in limited editions here and abroad, and are now made available in one volume. Border Music is Vangelisti’s second book from Talisman House, with the collectionTwo having appeared in 2011. As Bill Mohr noted in the Chicago Review, “If seemingly willful obscurity is often a deterrent in reading or viewing work from any avant-garde, Vangelisti's poems are replete with a sustained clarity that invites us to savor these moments without being penalized for letting go of that which seems inaccessible.”

Paul Vangelisti is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, as well as being a noted translator from Italian. In 2015 his Solitude was published in a bilingual edition by Galleria Mazzoli Editore in Modena; and a new collection, Border Music, has just appeared from Talisman House in Greenfield, MA. In 2006, Lucia Re’s and his translation of Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations won both the Premio Flaiano in Italy and the PEN-USA Award for Translation; while in 2010, his translation of Adriano Spatola’s The Position of Things: Collected Poems, 1961-1992 received an Academy of American Poets Prize. From 1971-1982 he was co-editor, with John McBride, of the literary magazine Invisible City and, from 1993-2002, edited Ribot, the annual report of the College of Neglected Science. He worked as a journalist at the Hollywood Reporter (1972-1974), and as Cultural Affairs Director at KPFK Radio (1974-1982). Vangelisti was Founding Chair of the Graduate Writing program at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles, and is currently a professor in that program.