If you’re a poetry fan, don’t miss a very special Passager reading tonight at 6:30 in the Poe Room at the Central Branch of the Enoch Pratt. It’s free and open to the public and promises to be packed with more than a dozen talented writers aged 50 and above, hailing from Baltimore and well beyond, including Shirley Brewer, Joe Hann, Ellen Hartley, Wendy Hoffman, Jennifer Keith Ciattei, Steve Matanle…
Of Hot Flash Sonnets, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has written that Egan’s “unabashed admissions, balanced by the sonnet’s strictures and the wit of her endings, extend to the reader the double pleasure of craft and disclosure.” Poet Molly Peacock avers that “it’s the skill of this poet that dazzles, for she turns her stunning sequence into a vast landscape, contouring matters of beauty and aging in divinely controlled lines.” Annie Finch praises the collection for its raising of “the stakes of light verse beyond wit to encompass willfulness, wordplay, and womanly wisdom,” and National Book Award-winning poet Marilyn Hacker calls the poems “terrific, a virtuoso number, witty, pithy, tragi-comic… they remind me, not surprisingly, of John Berryman, but with less self-indulgence.”
