Fairfield University hosts an evening of poetry with Kate Light to celebrate Connecticut Arts Week | Press Releases

Image: Kate Light Celebrated poet Kate Light will read a selection of poems from her new book "Open Slowly" at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26, in the multimedia room of the DiMenna-Nyselius Library at Fairfield University.

The reading, which is part of the English department's celebration of Connecticut Arts Week, is free and open to the public.

Kate Light, the author of "The Laws of Falling Bodies," carries on her standard of wise, witty poems on living, loving and making sense of the two, in "Open Slowly" (Zoo Press, 2003). Her pragmatic themes - relationships, love, attractions and the bodies that contain them - do open slowly, and her lyrical poems, says fellow poet Molly Peacock, "seem more conjured than written."

Among Light's accolades are the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Yaddo Residency, the Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, the Sewanee Writers' Conference Fellowship, and the Bossak-Heilbron Foundation Grant. Light's poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Hudson Review, Dark Horse, Washington Post Book World, Feminist Studies, Barrow Street, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet.

Ms. Light is also a professional violinist and a member of the orchestra of the New York City Opera. "It's not surprising that her poetry is so musical," said Kim Bridgford, Ph.D., professor of English at Fairfield University.

"She's a fitting poet to celebrate Connecticut Arts Week, because she's not only a poet, but a musician," Dr. Bridgford said. "She's a living testament that the arts matter."

"Kate Light risks body and soul in the love poems of Open Slowly, chronicling an affair that takes her into a psychic wilderness," reviewer Suzanne Noguere said of "Open Slowly." "She syncopates the rhythm of poetic forms and wires them with the voltage of rhyme. Her voice - conversational, quick, compelling - is instantly recognizable and her poems utterly memorable."

No reservations are required for the reading. For more information, contact Kim Bridgford, Ph.D., at (203) 254-4000, ext. 2795.