Library Book Club

All experience levels are welcome to a monthly book group moderated by library staff. In 2013, the library will ask individuals from varied backgrounds to select a title that has been meaningful to them. Space is limited to 15 participants. Please register in advance by emailing library@poetryfoundation.org.

May’s curator, Rosie Schaap, selected A. R. Ammons’s Garbage for the following reasons:
 
“I tend to resist book-length poems (unless, you know, it's Chaucer or Dante or Milton...), but when Garbage came out in 1993, I read it in one sitting, as if in a trance. It's a poem with chutzpah and beauty in great and equal measures, both earthy and philosophic. And Ammons's voice, always singular and mighty, is here at its most persuasively, urgently prophetic.”

Rosie Schaap is the author of the memoir Drinking With Men, and writes the “Drink” column for The New York Times Magazine. She has also been a bartender, a fortuneteller, a librarian at a paranormal society, an editor, a preacher, a community organizer, and a manager of homeless shelters. A contributor to This American Life and poetryfoundation.org, her essays and articles have appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Lucky Peach, Marie Claire, and Saveur. Schaap is currently working on a book about whiskey.