Ethan Paquin, assistant professor of English, continued his book tour in support of his latest collection of poems, My Thieves (Salt, 2007), by reading at several universities in Missouri. Along with fellow poet-editor Michael Dumanis, Paquin read on November 5 at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville; November 6 as part of The Honors College & Pleiades Magazine Visiting Writers Series at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg; and November 6 at Ragtag Cinemacafé in Columbia, sponsored in part by the Center for the Literary Arts of the University of Missouri.
According to the Salt Publishing web site, My Thieves is “a study of the relationships between the visual and literary arts, and is also a meditation on the nature of creativity and artistic authenticity. Paquin, a poet with great interest in painting and the visual arts in general, writes about those artists across disciplines who’ve influenced him using a wide range of poetic structures and forms. At the heart of the book is the concern that perhaps the creative individual is merely an imitator of all the art he has ever admired; at the book’s center is the fear that the “self” is just a collection of other selves absorbed through one’s lifetime.”