August 7, 2018:
Joseph Mills will be the Featured Poet at the Nexus Poet’s Poetry Open Mic at 7:30 pm, Tuesday, August 7 at the Arts and Wellness Center located at 919 Broad Street in New Bern.
Poet and critic Joseph Robert Mills grew up in Indiana. He earned a BA at the University of Chicago, an MA at the University of New Mexico, and a PhD at the University of California, Davis.
Mills latest book Exit, Pursued by a Bear, is a collection of poems based on a stage direction in a Shakespeare play. Mills offers variations and revisions of both well-known figures, such as Juliet, Hamlet, and Shylock, and minor characters; he gives bemused speculations about the playwright’s life, and, over the course of the book, he engages with all of Shakespeare’s plays.
Praise for Exit, Pursued by a Bear:
What an inspired collection! The lines between reality and the stage, between life and art, between past and present—they’re all blurred into an exciting whirligig of poetry based on Shakespeare’s stage directions. You don’t have to be a Shakespeare nut to fall in love with this collection.
—Robert Lee Brewer, author Solving the World’s Problems and editor of Poet’s Market
After the Featured Poet reads, the mic is open for original poems from other poets who sign up. This is a free event with donations requested to support Nexus Poets, a not-for-profit group of New Bern poets promoting poetry in eastern North Carolina.