Poetry Reading: Keith O’Shaughnessy

“His poetry is as impeccable and sui generis as he is … His lines are simultaneously earnest and playful, austere and effusive, direct and multivalent. Sentences can spill across dozens of lines without losing their grammatical coherence or sense of trajectory.” – ERIC MCHENRY, Columbia Magazine Poet and Princeton resident Keith O’Shaughnessy will present a reading from his latest work, Petrushka. An audience Q&A and signing will follow. Set in a quasi-Russian dreamscape, the blackly comic, darkly beautiful poems and fables contained in this vast volume chronicle, in an elaborate symphonic arrangement of recurring themes and motifs, the miscellaneous travails of several interacting characters—ballerina, chess master, opera tenor, cabaret chanteuse (if not, too, the odd street urchin, idiot, or organ grinder)—all under the vigilant glare of the gleefully belligerent, aggressively indecorous Petrushka puppet thwacking away savagely at his various adversaries with his signature slapstick. By turns elegant, satirical, and absurd, the collection, like its namesake, revels throughout in the perverse and grotesque, yet always with mischievous wit and rhetorical invention. In 2011 Keith O’Shaughnessy’s first book of poems, Incommunicado, won the inaugural Grolier Discovery Award, sponsored by the legendary Cambridge bookshop of the same name. His second, Last Call for Ganymede, followed in 2014 from Ilora Press. At long last, his magnum opus, Petrushka, was released by Ragged Sky Press in March of 2026. Along the way he also authored three chapbooks—Carnaval, The Devil’s Party, and Snegurochka—all with Pudding House Publications. A near-lifelong resident of Princeton, he teaches English at Camden County College in southern New Jersey. Learn more by visiting keithoshaughnessy.com. free rsvp