Award-winning poet reads from new book

Lynn Emmanuel, author of Hotel Fiesta and winner of the National Poetry Series, read a selection of poems from her new book, The Dig, Wednesday night in Houston Hall. The collection centers around a story of poverty and "the entire trajectory of a woman's life" in a small Nevada town during the atomic bomb tests, she said. Emmanuel described the collection as a series of dramatic monologues. To emphasize each voice, she moved from one side of the podium to the other. She began her reading with "The Politics of Narrative," involving a person who cannot resist that which she criticizes. The reading continued on with poems such as "The Planet Krypton," which compared her hometown to that of the comic world, and "Past and Present," in which she describes herself as "over-educated, but recovering." The point of this collection of works is to make a reader of the book question the representative "I," she explained. Her intention is to complicate readers' expectations of the "I," rather than just offering the poem as a window into herself. Gregory Djanikian, director of the Creative Writing Program, introduced Emmanuel by describing her poetry as an "explosion of sound." "While she offers the expanse of the world, she is also aware of the hardest edges of our lives," Djanikian said. The poetry reading was the third of six organized by a collaboration between the Philomathean Society and the Creative Writing Program. The readings are intended "to provide intellectual discourse and extracurricular activity," said Wharton and College junior Tyler Dickovick, Philomathean moderator.

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