"It wasn't the life I would have wanted, / had I known what sort of life I did want"
-- Sarah Arvio, from "Chagrin"

DANVILLE, KY--The Centre College English program will sponsor a public poetry reading by Sarah Arvio on Wednesday, April 19 at 7 p.m. in the Norton Center Boardroom on campus.

Arvio will read from her most recent book of poems, Sono, which was composed during a long stay in Rome. Described as "bracingly original," Arvio's most recent work reveals her struggle to come to terms with loss and grief and to find a basis for renewal.

"Arvio's poems are overtly musical--even daring--in their alliteration, abundance of puns, wordplay and relentless rhythms," says Lisa Williams, assistant professor of English at Centre. "Sono gives us a bold series of poems that both poke fun at and exhaustively investigate cliches about life, love, sex, hope, death and art, even as they brilliantly juggle the high and low terms of our language."

Born in 1954 in Philadelphia, Arvio grew up near New York City. She was educated at schools abroad, and later attended Columbia University, where she studied writing. She currently works as a translator for the United Nations.

Arvio won the Rome Prize and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship for her first book of poems, Visits from the Seventh. Poems in that volume were awarded The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize and Poetry's Frederick Bock Prize.

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Founded in 1819, Centre College is ranked among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges. Centre alumni, known for their nation-leading loyalty in annual financial support, include two U.S. vice presidents and two Supreme Court justices. For more, visit http://www.centre.edu/web/elevatorspeech/

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