Four readings tonight, including at least one good one.

First, and most importantly, we have Thomas Lynch at St. James Cathedral. I wrote about Lynch in this week’s Constant Reader. He’s a skilled poet, a brilliant essayist, and, by all accounts, a very good funeral director:

Lynch has written three poetry collections full of ornate beauty. He writes the kind of poems that would be the perfect balm for the reader who fell off the poetry wagon back in 10th grade while feverishly trying to memorize “O Captain! My Captain!” for a graded test. From Lynch’s “A Note on the Rapture to His True Love”: “From a sunlit room/I watch my neighbor’s sugar maple turn/to shades of gold. It’s late September. Soon…/Soon as I’m able I intend to turn/To gold myself.” It’s just the kind of stately image that you’d expect from an undertaker.

But then, later in the same poem, after the death imagery, comes the lust: “Anyway, I’d like to get my hands on/you. I’d like to kiss your eyelids and make love/as if it were our last time, or the first,/or else the one and only form of love/divisible by which I yet remain myself.”

At Elliott Bay Book Company, local author Nancy Horan will be reading from the paperback release of her book Loving Frank, which is a novel about Frank Lloyd Wright, and his love affair, which was no doubt full of sweeping and futuristic lines, and didn’t age well.

Marya Hornbacher is at Town Hall. She wrote Wasted, about her struggle with both anorexia and bulimia. Now she’s got a book called Madness, about her struggle with bipolar disorder. Perhaps next she’ll write a nice book about knitting, or a bad dog who taught her many lessons about life.

And James Howard Kunstler is at the University Bookstore with a book called World Made By Hand, which is a science fiction-type look at the world after all that environmental stuff that Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio and so on and so forth keep saying is going to happen finally happens. Maybe someone should ask the author his opinion on plastic bags.

Don’t forget that the full readings calendar, including the next week or so, here.