Poet Lisa Russ Spaar to celebrate book launch at New Dominion Bookshop

New Dominion Bookshop will host a poetry reading and book launch with UVA professor and poet Lisa Russ Spaar on Saturday, Nov. 6, from 4-5 p.m.

Spaar’s new poetry collection, Madrigalia: New and Selected Poems, will be released from Persea in November.

This event is free to attend and open to the public. The bookshop recommends arriving early for the best seating.

For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.

The “ringleader of a stunning lexicon” (Shenandoah), Spaar offers poems that are both colloquial and sumptuous, hyper-attuned to contemporary idiom while rooted in language’s primordial, earthy roots. Whether writing of the erotic or the divine, of anorexia or insomnia, of fairy tale or literary history, Spaar’s writing is unmistakably her own, a trove of music and magic like nothing else in contemporary poetry.

In Madrigalia, her oeuvre is on full display; it is a showcase of her indispensable poetic gifts, a tribute to a writer both ascetic and ecstatic.

Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Orexia (Persea, 2017), and a collection of essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry. She is the editor of four poetry anthologies, most recently More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems.

Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. She is a poetry columnist for Los Angeles Review of Books and a professor of English at the University of Virginia.