Jennifer Clarvoe (Piano Piano) Author Talk and Signing

Description

Bank Square Books presents an author talk and signing with Jennifer Clarvoe for her book, Piano Piano. 

About the Book 

In Piano Piano, Clarvoe crafts a luminous meditation on time, loss, and the enduring power of art to transform grief into grace. These poems move with the deliberate tempo their title suggests - piano piano, slowly, gently - through landscapes both intimate and archaeological, from a father's final breaths to ancient curse tablets unearthed in Turkish soil. With exquisite attention to craft, Clarvoe weaves together the personal and the timeless: a bee working alongside the poet at her window, fragments of pottery that carry the "added failure" of ancient repairs, and Lumière's first flickering films. Her voice finds profound beauty in broken things - fibroid infarctions become odes, torn fieldbook pages become elegies. This collection reveals how memory and art preserve what matters most: the music falling "slantwise / like the gold ray / of the Annunciation" that accompanied a father's final season. Piano Piano is a masterwork of formal innovation and emotional precision. 

About the Author 

Jennifer Clarvoe is the author of two books of poetry: Invisible Tender (Fordham, 2000), and Counter-Amores (University of Chicago, 2011). Her awards and fellowships include the Kate Tufts Prize, the Poets Out Loud Prize for Invisible Tender, a fellowship from the Sewanee Writers Conference, a residency at the James Merrill House, and the Rome Prize in Literature. She taught literature and creative writing at Kenyon College for many years. She lives in Somerville, MA, with her husband, Tony Sigel.