Little Corner Reading Series

The poetry of Rachel Zucker zigzags breathlessly between ampersands and competing demands—those of motherhood, art, and work, to name just a few—as if the poems were jotted down between bus stops and the buzzing of different Apple products. Real people and voices often surface in her work, clamoring for attention as she charts the distance between cosmic overexposure and moments of “great sincerity & pleasure.” Such apparent ease is sleight of hand, though: Anxious tenderness is textured between a series of assured formal tricks. All this is to say that these preoccupations make Zucker, who teaches poetry at NYU and is the author of nine books, a natural addition to the second installment of the Duke University English Departments’ Little Corner Reading Series, which this year takes on the theme of “Excess Women.” Zucker is joined by the poets Lauren Hunter, a Durham-based educator and editor; Laura Jaramillo, a doctoral candidate in literature at Duke; and series co-organizer Hannah VanderHart, who is also at Duke, writing a dissertation on collaborative poetry in the Renaissance. —Sarah Edwards