Professor Kathleen Aguero's
Book Party and Signing

September 18, 2004
5:30 – 7:00 p.m.

In honor of Pine Manor College professor Kathleen Aguero's new book of poetry, Daughter Of, a book party and signing will be held at The Grolier Poetry Book Shop on Plympton Street in Harvard Square from 5:30 – 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, September 18. Aguero's new book was published by Cedar Hill Books.

In addition to Daughter Of, Kathleen Aguero is the author of two previous volumes of poetry: Thirsty Day and The Real Weather. She has also co-edited two volumes of multicultural literature, A Gift of Tongues and An Ear to the Ground, and edited Daily Fare: Essays from the Multicultural Experience, for the University of Georgia Press. She has been a Visiting Research Associate at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is a Professor of English and Director of the College Composition Program at Pine Manor College.

See Aguero's schedule of upcoming reading engagements.

Blurbs about Daughter Of

Daughter Of is a rich and compelling book by a poet at the height of her powers. Kathleen Aguero doesn’t waste words, writes with feeling, and knows how to deliver a kick-in-the-teeth surprise. Her gift for seeing sharp, unexpected resemblances kept me saying Yes--—that’s exactly right. Her account of the bitter post-Tempest married life of Shakespeare’s Miranda is alone worth the price of admission; but the book abounds in other accomplished poems, evidently drawn from myth, dream, longing, family lore and memorable experience.

X.J. Kennedy

In Daughter Of, Kathleen Aguero documents, with devastating precision, the private and public lives of girls and women. Inflected by feminism and post modernism, these poems—couplets, free verse, litany, prose poem, rhymed quatrains, crowns of sonnets, villanelle—deliver many sonic pleasures as they detonate pieties. The poet deploys figures from religion and mythology to illuminate, with canny intelligence, western constructions of body, gender, relationship: in a dramatic monologue, a contemporary Persephone admits I mistook/his appraisal for praise. There’s no mistaking Aguero’s linguistic nimbleness or her searing insights in this heartbreaking and tough-minded collection.

Robin Becker
author of The Horse Fair

The Miranda of the brilliant opening sequence in Kathleen Aguero’s new collection, Daughter Of embodies Deleuze and Guattari’s radical insight, from Anti-Oedipus, that “the unconscious is an orphan and creates itself out of nature and man.” Forged of equal parts will and insight, the Miranda who abandons her fate for the dark lore of her mother and brother is the mind and heart that course through all the poems of this collection. Wide-ranging and masterful in form, they wed sheer lyric gorgeousness with discursive gravity. The woman’s voice in American poetry that was only dreamed of thirty years ago has been realized in this collection that excavates and polishes finds from the landscape of female life in myth, literature, religion and integrates them seamlessly and inevitably with the pantheon of a lived contemporary and domestic life.

Linda McCarriston

Kathleen Aguero
Schedule of readings
from her new book, Daughter Of:

• Sept. 30, 7:00 p.m. - Andover Bookstore, 89R, Andover, Mass.,
• Oct, 6, 7:30 p.m - Chapter & Verse, St. John’s Episcopal Church, 1 Roanoke Ave. Jamaica Plain, . with Jean Flanagan
• Oct. 14, 7:00 p.m. - New England Poetry Club, Central Sq., Library, Cambridge, with Richard Hoffman
• Nov. 3, 7:00 p.m - Quincy Public Library, Quincy, Mass., . with Jean Flanagan and Richard Hoffman
• Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m - Arlington Center for the Arts, 41 Foster St., Arlington, ., with Steve Cramer
• Nov. TBA - Bedford Public Library, Bedford, Mass.
• Dec. 7, 7:30 p.m - Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St, Newton, Mass., . with Dan Tobin
• Dec. 19 - Cornelia St Café, NYC, with Dan Tobin
• Wed. Jan. 26 - MacIntyre and Moore Bookstore, Davis Sq., Somerville, Mass., with other readers (to be announced)
• April 1, 2005 - Ravenna Third Place Books, Seattle,
• Spring 2005 - University of Cincinnati, specific date to be announced.

Cedar Hill Books, San Diego, CA
www.cedarhillbooks.org