Archive Text: Writers’ Workshop graduates Michael Tyrell and Steve Kuusisto read from their new poetry.

Michael Tyrell reads from his recent book of poetry, The Wanted. "Like the haunted, disconnected heads on a wanted poster, Michael Tyrell’s daring and fiercely intelligent poems signify nothing less than the mystery of existence, the relationship between how one is perceived to what one really is, if such a thing were possible to express. To read these remarkable poems is to enter the shadow world of the wanted, where every surface is vulnerable to a violence, real or implied, that will crack it open to reveal a secret code. A book of masks where the disguised often forgets it wears the mask and the mask forgets it is not the face, The Wanted invites us to 'enter the wet bladed edges/ which break us again into separate beings, / pour salt into wherever we bleed.' Enter with caution and be prepared to lose yourself." —Henry Israeli

Tyrell's poems have appeared in over 50 print and online venues, including Agni, The Canary, Fogged Clarity, Gulf Coast,  Mudlark, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Paris Review,  Ploughshares, Sycamore Review, Toronto Quarterly, and The Yale Review .

Writers' Workshop graduate and former Professor in The University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, Steve Kuusisto reads from his new collection of poetry Letters to Borges. Stephen Kuusisto is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. He is the author of two collections of poetry and two memoirs, including the best-selling Planet of the Blind. He teaches at Syracuse University in New York State. In this new collection of poems, blindness becomes a kaleidoscope through which voids and indistinctions are colored with imagination, where "poetry carves a topiary garden out of dust."

"If we account for Kuusisto’s restricted sight, the brilliance of his verse acquires deeper resonance, for his work imagines a realm between sight and sound composed of the sensory stimuli we all know and recognize, but split, fractured, and juxtaposed to inhabit the mind’s ear of his readers, a feat unique to this truly gifted poet. — Diego Báez, Booklist