I missed a very important event tonight.

At Open Books at 7:30 pm, Jon Woodward will be reading with Oni Buchanan. I'm not familiar with Buchanan's work, but Woodward is the author of Rain, a collection of poetry from Wave Books.

Consider this review from The Believer:

Here’s a book you can read in half an hour; it could stay with you for years. Rain might be a set of short, sad, digressive, casual one-page poems, all in the same type of stanza: five lines of five words each. It might be a verse-diary. But it might be, instead, a book-length elegy for the author’s friend Patrick, dead—apparently—after his teens and before middle age. In these ways it resembles—it is a modern, miniature answer to—Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Victorian best seller In Memoriam (1850). Tennyson, tracking his own grief for his best friend, captured his contemporaries’ high seriousness and their fears that there might be no God. Woodward’s more modest work captures a zeitgeist too: it’s a poem of anxious, underemployed Gen-X-and-a-half-ers migrating to coastal cities, unsure of their wings, willingly distracted from whatever big plans they so diffidently assembled in more optimistic undergraduate days....

It really is a gorgeous book of poems. Here's something from a page I opened to at random:

but the house sparrows are
mating again, each on top
of the other or sideways
flapping and chirping they're so
immodest so indiscriminate with each

other although it doesn't look
like it actually feels good
it looks like some voltage
is making them do it
but they do it regardless

Rarely do you find a book of poems that works like this: You can read the entire thing in one sitting, as one coherent work, and you can also dip in and out, cutting and pasting portions together. It's like a novel with about sixty percent of the narrative cut out, leaving just an aching, raw heart. It's about death, yes, but it's about sex and nature and vodka and everything else. It's a thin book of great substance, and you should go to this reading tonight rather than all the others I talked about tonight.

Apologies to Open Books and to Jon Woodward for failing to mention this reading this morning.