By Lucie Coppola

The English Department hosted a poetry reading by Maggie Dietz and Nicole Terez Dutton on Feb. 25. It was located in the Poetry Center on the third floor of the Sawyer Library and was free and open to the public. The room was not packed, but was filled with thoughtful students, professors, and adults who were interested in hearing what the poets had to read.

Maggie Dietz is currently an assistant professor at UMass Lowell, and formerly taught in the creative writing program at Boston University. She has won many awards including the 2007 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry, and her work has appeared in a wide range of literary journals such as Harvard Review and Ploughshares. Dietz grew up in Green Bay, Wisc. but now resides in New Hampshire with her twins and husband Todd Hearon, who is also a poet.

Nicole Terez Dutton is a lecturer at Boston University and presently lives in Somerville, Mass. Dutton has been awarded an array of fellowships, one being at the Fine Arts Work Center. Like Dietz, her work has been published in many literary journals such as 32 Poems and Indiana Review.

Dietz read first, starting off with a more solemn tone. Her selected poems were on the short and concise side. All had a bit of a somber feel. Dutton finished with poems longer in length which all had a sense of being in motion.

Dietz started with a poem from her first book Perennial Fall titled “The Yellow House,” 1978. This poem was amazingly simple yet detailed.

Explaining that she was coming out with a new book of poetry soon, she said she was sick of reading from her old book so most of what she read after that was from her soon to be published book.

She then read a number of poems, from one about her daughter Kempy another about her son Lionel and two others about the recent death of her father due to cancer.

“I have many memories of late night flights and this stems from them, although you’ll see this gets a little unreal,” Dietz explained opening for one particular poem.

She then read a striking poem about corn fields turning into something very different.

Each poem was gripping and simply beautiful with an almost depressing air, to which she said, “I’m sorry it’s so solemn.”

Dutton finished up with readings from her book “If One Of Us Should Fall.” All of her poems had a similar feeling of movement. She had told the audience of her days of being in a funk band when she was always on the road, “never actually meeting a destination.”

Her last poem “Every Answer Is Yes” told of crammed basement shows with the optimism of moving about to different places and always missing curfew. The ever-moving flow of her poems brought together different stories of her adventures and memories with her beautiful style.

Stay tuned for the next poetry reading hosted by Suffolk’s English Department.