Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome two-term U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins for a reading and signing of his new collection, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems. Local poet and artist Gary Young, who teaches at UCSC and was Santa Cruz County’s first Poet Laureate, will introduce Mr. Collins.

Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself. Aimless Love combines more than fifty new poems with selections from four previous books—Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. By turns playful, ironic, and serious, Collins’s poetry captures the nuances of everyday life while leading the reader into zones of inspired wonder. In the poet’s own words, he hopes that his poems “begin in Kansas and end in Oz.” Touching on the themes of love, loss, joy, and poetry itself, these poems showcase the best work of this “poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace” (The New Yorker).
 

This offsite event will take place at UCSC Music Recital Hall. Parking is $3, but is located next to the venue and is easily accessible.

People with disabilities needing assistance are asked to contact us in advance: email bookshopevents@yahoo.com or call 46-3232
PLEASE NOTE: Tickets will be sold by row, with open seating within each row. If you are planning on attending this event with others, you will want to purchase tickets as a group if you’d like to sit next to each other.
 

TICKETS: $28.30, includes one ticket to the event & one copy of Aimless Love.

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Author photo courtesy of Suzannah Gilman