Marilyn Annucci, DeWitt Clinton

press release: A Room of One’s Own Bookstore has announced that Madison poet Marilyn Annucci and Milwaukee poet DeWitt Clinton will be reading together from their new collections of poetry on Feb 1 at 6 pm. Annucci’s collection, The Arrows that Choose Us, is a national prize-winning book of poems from Press 53 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  Clinton’s collection, At the End of the War, was released last fall from Kelsay Books, Hemet, California. 

Both books will be for sale, and, following the reading, the two will sign copies of their collections.

Annucci, author also of Luck, a chapbook from Parallel Press (Madison), and Waiting Room, winner of the 2012 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, lives in Madison and is a Professor of English in the Languages & Literatures Department at the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater.  Her recent poetry and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, North American Review, and Indiana Review.

Grace Cavalieri, in The Washington Review of Books, writes that “Annucci has the ability to take the most insular moments, make them public, and turn it all into contemporary art. She’s an honest observer, fulfilling poetry’s demands by recording small acts, — giving a cup of water to Mexico’s stray dogs; seeing faces pressed against a Saint’s glass picture frame; watching a mother “breathy from Winstons” — her theme is aloneness, and each poem broadens that loneliness to become a moral voice weighing what we mean to each other and what we could mean. Some poems offer unexpected patterns, others emphasize with a stylish swag.”

Clinton is the author of The Conquistador Dog Texts and The Coyot. Inca Texts (New Rivers Press), and six chapbooks.  His poems and essays have appeared in the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, Cultural Studies< => Critical Methodologies, Storytelling Sociology: Narrative as Social Inquiry, and Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry (Oxford U Press). He is Professor Emeritus of English at the UW-Whitewater, and lives in Shorewood.

Jenni Herrick of The Shepherd Express (Milwaukee) notes that his “poems philosophize the startling brutality of war" (particularly the Vietnam War, as I am a veteran) and "uses perspective-shifting narratives to muse on human atrocities, but it also weaves together beautiful spiritual images and considers timeless universal questions. Clinton draws on the wisdom and mysteries of his Jewish faith as well as the guidance learned from centuries of wise East Asian philosophers to ponder anew the intersections of our past and present.”