Join noted poet and scholar Kathy Fagan for the launch of her seventh poetry collection, The Unbecoming, a dazzling meditation on the limits of life. Kathy will be in conversation with fellow poet and New York Times bestselling author Maggie Smith.
Purchase your tickets now! Admission fee is waived with the purchase of The Unbecoming.
On a sketch of the Virgin and Child, Michelangelo instructed his young assistant, in shorthand Italian, to Draw faster, acknowledging that life lasts a moment, death—and art—far longer. As an aging, bi, childless poet currently recognizing the limits of her own life and that of our planet, Kathy Fagan has immersed herself in the intimate and urgent discovery that growth and decay are the same cycle, and that art and memory, made in the tumultuous rush of these, are the deeply human attempts to outlast them.
Fagan’s luminous seventh collection, The Unbecoming, begins with the sequence “Listening to Others,” and a command, Run, into a process that is, for all of us, a circle of becoming and unbecoming simultaneously. Favoring perspective over nostalgia and clarity over certainty, the poems are, then, memento mori, a loving reminder, a poet’s reckoning with the rewards and losses of age, and with our painfully beautiful little lives “rounded with a sleep.”
Kathy Fagan is the author of seven poetry collections including Bad Hobby, winner of the 2023 William Carlos Williams Award. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship, Fagan is professor emerita of English at The Ohio State University.
Maggie Smith is the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of nine books of poetry and prose, including A Suit or a Suitcase, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, Goldenrod, Keep Moving, and My Thoughts Have Wings. She has been widely published, appearing in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, and more. She is the host of The Slowdown. You can find her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.
Ohio State University Department of English and Ohio Poetry Association are Gramercy’s Community Partners for this program.