My Thieves

Ethan Paquin is the author of four books of poetry: The Makeshift (UK: Stride, 2002); Accumulus (Salt, 2003); The Violence (Ahsahta Press, 2005), a runner-up for the 2006 William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; and the new My Thieves (Salt, 2007), whose launch this evening celebrates. His books have been reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review (London), PN Review (London), Verse, New Review of Literature, and Publishers Weekly. His poems have been published in Colorado Review, Fence, Boston Review, and Quarterly West, and in the Australian journals Jacket and Meanjin. Paquin is Director of Creative Writing and Assistant Professor of English at Medaille College in Buffalo, and founder and editor of the literary journal Slope and the small poetry press, Slope Editions.

My Thieves is a study of the relationships between the visual and literary arts and a meditation on the nature of creativity and artistic authenticity. Paquin—a poet with great interest in painting and the visual arts in general—writes about those artists across disciplines who have influenced him, using a wide range of poetic structures and forms. At the heart of the book is the concern that perhaps the creative individual is merely an imitator of all the art s/he has ever admired; at the book's center is the fear that the “self” is just a collection of other selves absorbed through one's lifetime.

Some publications related to this event:
April, 2007 - 2007