Poet Rick Mulkey, director of the Converse College Creative Writing MFA program, along with his literary friends, will read from his newest collection of poems at Hub City Bookshop. The launch event will take place Thursday, Aug. 28 from 7 – 8 p.m.
In addition to Mulkey, Upstate authors and artists Angela Kelly, Tom Johnson, Claire Bateman, Scott Robbins and Susan Tekulve will read a favorite selection from Ravenous: New & Selected Poems.
Rick Mulkey’s Ravenous: New & Selected Poems provides new and returning readers an opportunity to consider recent and previously published work in a collection containing wide stylistic variety with deep unifying themes and concerns. From an 18th Century Persian village to the porches and homestead’s of the Appalachian South, these poems counterpoint the sorrowful with the joyful, exploring how “even in the soul’s grim mines, one tuned string/perfectly plucked could make us believe all would be right.”
Denise Duhamel, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and editor of Best American Poetry 2013, in reviewing Rick’s book wrote, “Rick Mulkey’s Ravenous: New & Selected Poems is as beautiful an exploration you’ll ever encounter about ‘that empty hole/ we live our lives filling.’ Populated with the cosmos and the red velvet mite, with the present day South and nineteenth-century Berlin, Mulkey’s poems hunger for big truths, little truths, love and justice. Ravenous offers readers over two decades worth of Mulkey’s work in one volume, the more recent poems echoing and complicating the mysteries of earlier ones, all infused with the inscrutability of our existence. Mulkey’s irresistible American vernacular, visceral wisdom, and lyrical honesty make him one of the most authentic poetic voices of his generation.”
Mulkey is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Toward Any Darkness, Before the Age of Reason and Bluefield Breakdown. Individual poems and essays have appeared in a variety of periodicals such as Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Shenandoah and Southern Poetry Review, and his work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including American Poetry: the Next Generation, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volumes I and II, A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry and more. He has received a Hawthornden Fellowship and The Literary Review’s Charles Angoff Award, among others. Mulkey has taught at universities and writing workshops in the United States and Europe, and he currently directs the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Converse College.