Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson is an accomplished writer and poet; she teaches at Tufts University.

Recently, I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

Well thank you for asking! It made me stop in the middle of what is usually an uninterrupted and not particularly considered stream of picking up and putting down this book and that. So here is what I've been reading the last day or two, in addition to poems and comments by my students - and more or less why and what I've discovered.

I am happily surprised by the fresh angle of commentary on Isabella Stewart Gardner and her acquaintances in Patricia Vigderman's new book, The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner, which I only discovered because I went to a bookstore reading in New Hampshire. To take one self-glorifying woman and circle around her and into the world as she wandered it, interspersed with and shaped by the very titles of her collection.

I'm reading Hayden Carruth's Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey with much delight.

In between I'm picking up various books about Switzerland. The one on my right, by Lina Hug and Richard Stead was written in 1902 and chats merrily about the discovery of lake dwellings from the bronze age that had just been discovered, by accident in the mud of a dried lake outside Zurich! My other book about Switzerland spills hundreds of names of playwrights and poets and artists and thinkers I in my benighted state of knowledge had no idea were Swiss.

For several weeks I've been dipping into CD Wright's remarkable Deepstep Come Shining. Suddenly her new book, One Big Self: An Investigation, arrived in the mail. So that's tomorrow.

Last week I read Dale Peterson's about Jane Goodall, nonstop, couldn't put it down. So much detail about such an astonishing life - and Dale is delicate and deft in his almost invisible commentary.

I am also reading A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature by Jacqueline Goldsby - a complex and mind altering book.

And that's it, not counting The New Yorker.

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson has had work published in Agni, Field, The Harvard Review, The Boston Phoenix, Mothering, Antigonish, Northwest Review and Verse Daily, MARGIE, and in Slate, and forthcoming in an anthology called Cadence of Hooves.

She has published two chapbooks of poetry through Roundy Wells Press, Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition.

She has written reviews for The Boston Review of Books and Pleiades.

Read -- or listen to her read-- her poem, "Clearing the House," in Slate.

Read more Rebecca Kaiser Gibson poems.

--Marshal Zeringue