KGB Bar

Anna Rabinowitz’s most recent volume of poetry is Present Tense, (Omnidawn). Anna’s other books include At the Site of Inside Out, (U. Mass.) Darkling (Tupelo), which world-premiered as a multi-media opera off-Broadway, and The Wanton Sublime (Tupelo), soon to be an operatic monodrama. Awards include an NEA Fellowship and the Juniper Prize. Darkling’s latest incarnations will be a translation into German from Luxbooks and an internationally distributed CD from Albany Records, both due in 2011.

Patricia Brody’s first collection American Desire won a New Women’s Voices Award from Finishing Line Books in 2009. Marie Ponsot said of these poems, “A jet-winged eavesdropping angel, Brody sweeps in among the great ones, sight and sword keen and apt. In a suite of dramatic monologues, her poems do their voices, streaming in high style.” Awards include Academy of American Poets Alice M. Sellars prize, 1st prize from the English Speaking Union of New York CIty, and two Pushcart Nominations by Marilyn Hacker. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Barrow Street, Big City Lit, Chance of a Ghost, Western Humanities and Paris Review. Brody’s full length book of poems Dangerous to Know will be published by Salmon Poetry (Ireland) in 2012.

Toni Mergentime Levi is a poet and librettist, living in Manhattan.  Her new collection is Watching Mother Disappear & Other Poems, (Mayapple Press).  Her first collection For A Dancing Bear was published by Three Mile Harbor.  Toni’s poems have appeared in dozens of anthologies and journals.  She has been a resident fellow at the MacDowell Colony and numerous other artist colonies here and abroad. Thanksgiving, one of two operas and several other collaborations with composer Paul Alan Levi won a Grand Prize for new opera sponsored by the National Music Theatre Network, and was performed at Lincoln Center and on 42nd Street’s Theater Row.  Recently, four of her poems were set to music by composer Charles Fussell and premiered at Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall. 

Susan Tepper, FIZZ series host, will read a short selection.  Her new epistolary novel What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G (with Gary Percesepe) will be available early next year from Cervena Barva Press.  Tepper is also the author of the collection Deer & Other Stories (Wilderness House Press) and the poetry chapbook Blue Edge.

Guest Host Amy Holman