Poetry Reading with Tom Yuill

Tom Yuill will be reading at Prince Books on Sunday, April 25, at 3:00 p.m. 

Poet Tom Yuill, who grew up in Dallas and came to Norfolk to swim for Old Dominion University, initially left without
 taking a degree to live in Europe and Austin, Texas, writing poetry and reading on no fixed schedule before returning to ODU to take a BA in Literature and Philosophy and an MFA in Poetry. Yuill was then accepted in the Masters Program in Creative Writing at Boston University by then United States Poet Laureate Robert  Pinsky, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets Rosanna Warren and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. After completing that masters degree with Pinsky,
Walcott and Warren, he was offered a teaching position at Boston University, where he still teaches. Yuill also
teaches at the New England Institute of Art and the Massachusetts College of Art.

Yuill's first collection of poetry, "Medicine Show," has
just been published by the University of Chicago Press. Of
it Robert Pinsky writes,
 
"Tom Yuill's 'Medicine Show' lives up to both halves
of its title: a vivid, exhilarating imagination show that is
also strong medicine. Tom Yuill examines the grief and
desperation underlying postures and ruses of self-deception.
The book's brilliant adaptations and imitations of Hikmet
and Villon cast a raking, skeptical light on Texas versions
of the quasi-Byronic hero. Yuill's sardonic, clear-eyed
comedy is humane and antic: a born talker on a serious mission."

Reviews of Medicine Show:

"This is strong medicine: tough, dysphemistic at times, at times brilliantly rude, Yuill is a poet of praise but also a poet of the lowdown and the takedown, cutting in where other writers fear to go: ‘Your dead are real,’ he warns, ‘They’re on your shoulders, picking at your meals.’ Yuill is ready to see disgust, or violence, but even more ready to praise where praise is deserved. He’s tough on himself but kind to his great allies—the Rolling Stones, Francois Villon, Nazim Hikmet—who come with him even into his version of Texas, which follows him, like it or not, wherever he goes: ‘I roll up in a world that licks its chops / And thumps around me, sometimes stubs my toes.’ That’s what Yuill makes the moon say: as for what he hears from skinheads in Dallas, from the Firefly Lady, from previous lovers, you’ll have to listen in."

"Tom Yuill’s Medicine Show almost bursts its seams with its canny exuberance. Raucous, uncouth, elegiac, filial, tender, polished, and rough, these poems pay homage to lost parents, whether the biological mother and father or the poetic ancestors, Catullus, Villon, and Hikmet. Yuill wrings his own tunes from Texas stomp, the Rolling Stones, and the lyric masters of English. He’s reinventing fireworks."ROSANNA WARREN

If you cannot make the reading, please email or call to have a copy set aside for signing.