Started in 1997 by poets David Lehman and Star Black, the KGB Bar poetry series is widely recognized as the hottest and perhaps the best reading series in New York. Located in the hip East Village KGB Bar, these Monday-night readings boast a fantastic variety and quality of internationally known poets from Charles Simic, Molly Peacock, and Katha Pollit to Marie Howe, Mark Strand, and Yusef Komunyakaa.
Now Lehman and Black have gathered work from the first three seasons into a wonderful anthology. Together with a generous supply of photographs and anecdotes from contributors on the most memorable thing ever to happen to them at a poetry reading, this unique book of poems reflects the amazing variety and energy of poetry today.
The poems range in style from Douglas. Crase's "Astropastoral" ("I have seen you on every horizon, how you are stored/And encouraged and brought to the brim/Until the round bounds of one planet could not hold you in") to Anne Porter's "Five Wishes." Offering a wide window into contemporary poetry, The KGB Bar Book of Poems debunks the myth of poetry's ivory tower to reveal the kind of raw, candid reading experience that truly brings poetry to life.
"The pre-Russian revolutionary locale gives the gathering a committed, not to say conspiratorial air, and it somehow manages to foster a true sense of camaraderie, experimentation, and open exchange between readers and audience. I've seldom enjoyed an evening of poetry and friendship more."--Jonathan Galassi (President of The Academy of American Poets), the KGB Bar poetry seriesEvery Monday night, the KGB Bar's poetry readings are packed to overflowing. Pulitzer Prize winners bum cigarettes from grad students and martini glasses are refilled between readings, while the best poets in the country share their latest work with a rapt audience.
The KGB Bar is the sexiest and arguably the best venue for poetry in New York City, and now The KGB Bar Book of Poems brings this hot literary series to the page. Icons like John Ashbery and Charles Wright appear here with other favorites such as Molly Peacock and Katha Pollitt. Many of the poets have also written anecdotes about their own most memorable poetry readings.
 With dynamic black-and-white photographs throughout, The KGB Bar Book of Poems reflects the dazzling variety and tremendous energy of poetry today.

The KGB Bar Book Of Poems

Literature & Fiction

LEHMAN, David

Black, Star

Poetry

Harper-perennial

Waterworn

Fly-by-Night Press

The surreal crosswalks of the city.Star Black's poetry, urgent and oddly concentrated, is written in that rare other language of a city we have just begun to visit. The pleasures of this skeptical poetry are like those of an incomprehensible but entrancing tour of the city. Her clusters define her -- he hazardous inflammable fathoms of a prismatic poetics. A late symbolist, she remains faithful to a child's perspective, but after all the book adds up to an adult masque and a self-focusing lens. Something precise is always happening here, but also musical and canny or, simply, wise. -- David ShapiroIn October for Idas Star Black encounters vocabulary as world, a world often treacherous in its shifting planes, and abruptly revealed abbyses, its theorems arcane as lame establishing occult lines between naiads and power brunch. Language here is swarming and continually metamorphising presence -- Too many photostats gag the oracle -- through which the poet navigates a course measured by what is displaced. The most unaccountable juxtapositions, of trance and gruel, telecast and musk, are drawn into quick and startling harmonies, and a book made in part through collage techniques achieves a remarkable unity of feeling and texture. -- Geoffrey O'BrienThe poems in October for Idas careen and twist as if shadowing the fast-paced flusters of urban life. The book's title derives from the Greek myth of the maiden Marpessa, who, when asked to chose between the immortal glories of Apollo and the human love of Idas, chose the later.

October for Idas

Painted Leaf Pr

Continuing Tradition: Doubly Gifted Artists

Jackson, Katherine

Boccia, Edward

Stevens, Elisabeth

Halpert, V., B.

Peckham, E. Stoepel

Atelier A/E

"The sonnet, the phoenix of poetry, burns and rises in Star Black...molten and malleable [she] expands syntax and compresses discourse, pulsing at the brink of 21st century poetics...With only the straps of her rhymes to hang on to, she dares—and flies."– Molly PeacockDefying trends by writing scrupulously sculpted poems that revel in form and are unabashedly beautiful, playful and smart, Star Black, one of the most popular poets in the New York poetry scene, kicks off Melville House Publishing's NEW YORK POETS SERIES by focusing her edgy intellect on the sonnet.Her collection Ghostwood presents 48 chiseled gems that show off the many reasons why she is considered one of the leading practitioners of the sonnet writing in English today.Black's poems celebrate nature as well as life in the city. They link touching characters and explore the boundaries of love. They keen in grief and anger—as in her searing poem about the WTC attacks, "Perfect Weather"—and they bound into hope, as in the quirky beauty, "Asylum."In short, Black—who is also renowned as a photo-journalist whose work has appeared regularly in The New York Times and elsewhere—is the perfect example of the kind of poet highlighted by the NEW YORK POETS SERIES: a poets' poet who also has a huge popular following in Manhattan, and whose work is ready to be appreciated by a larger international audience.

Ghostwood (New York Poets)

Melville House

Reversing their roles in 2006's Stigmata Errata Etcetera, Star Black serves as poet, and Bill Knott takes on the role of artist. Bill Knott's colorful, mischievous, semi-abstract paintings compliment Star Black's meditations on love and relationships, as well as the divide between what time holds captive and what eludes time. In Velleity's Shade the temporal collides with the imagined and the passing years become a confluence of queries, shifting views, odd inventories, and light-hearted challenges as if time were a rocking-chair on a flying carpet and turbulence was nothing to fret about.Velleity's Shade is a special treat for lovers of art and poetry.

Veilleity's Shade (Artist/Poet Collaboration Series, 6)

Saturnalia Books

Balefire

<div>A shocked, funny, tender despondency ripples through Star Black's new collection as it cartwheels from the newspaper headlines after Donald Trump's 2016 victory to the intimacy of personal elegy. A spirited examination, The Popular Vote moves with casual spontaneity and verve, pressuring language into a performance of surprising, invigorating movements across syntax and line. From meditations on love, skyscapes, and cultural and personal loss, the poems in The Popular Vote reach out to the sleep-deprived majority of Americans who are governed by a president they didn't vote for. The result is a poetry collection full of vision and insight.</div>

The Popular Vote

Saturnalia

Le grand guide de la Malaisie...

Hoefer, Hans

Stephens, Harold

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Books by Black, Star