The Writer’s Center and Poet Lore welcome poet Dan Rosenberg (Bassinet) and fiction writer Michael Don (Partners and Strangers) for a reading and discussion of their work.
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Dan Rosenberg‘s new book, Bassinet, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2022. His work has won the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest and the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. An associate professor of English at Wells College, he lives in Ithaca, NY, with his wife, poet and nonfiction writer Alicia Rebecca Myers, and their son. Find him at danrosenberg.us.
Michael Don is the author of the story collection Partners and Strangers (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2019). His work has appeared in journals such as Washington Square Review, Fiction International, the Brooklyn Review, The Southampton Review, World Literature Today, and Southern Humanities Review. He teaches at George Mason University and coedits Kikwetu: A Journal of East African Literature. michaeldon.net
About the Books
Dan Rosenberg’s third collection of poetry, Bassinet, moves from loss into parenthood, exploring the roles of husband and father: their limits, their possibilities, and how they intersect with the wider world. Grounded in the familial, these poems wrestle with the political and the ecological, with heritage and hope, reimagining the breadth of home and what it means for one man to raise another to love it.
Dark, enigmatic, and sometimes comic, the stories in Partners and Strangers unite intimate anxieties with public dangers. Its characters embody grief, deviance, and the repressed. In “Yoav Feinberg’s Last Year at Home,” a teenager’s pain over his father’s death becomes unpredictably intertwined with an obsession with a cable man. In “A Home for an Eggplant,” the specter of a Craigslist killer provides a backdrop for a couple’s struggle with fertility. In “The Best Delivery Service,” the narrator and his sister, living together after their parents’ disappearance, obsessively order items through a hotline that promises delivery of anything one can imagine. The collection highlights a contemporary age characterized by loneliness and alienation.