Fireworks on Nassau Street

Highland Park is perfectly situated between two fine universities, with Rte. 27 similar to a great literary vein leading you to the finest modern writers. The afternoon readings at Princeton’s James M. Stewart '32 Theater has been pairing the likes of alumni poets Simon Armitage and Tony Hoagland, poet Maxine Kumin, and literary icon Joyce Carol Oates.

During the March reading, as the distinguished audience arrived in a spring rain, the sun seemed to be shining a little brighter on campus, lending a golden shine to the ivy covered buildings. It was no different for that afternoon’s hosts, the great American novelist Russell Banks and poet Chase Twitchell. Looking around you might be seated next to poet Alicia Ostriker; novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz and her husband, Pulitzer winning poet Paul Muldoon; or playwright Emily Mann, artistic director of the McCarter Theatre Center.

Twitchell took the stage to speak about putting together Horses Where The Answers Should Have Been, her collection published in 2010.

"I faced what I had done in the past," Twitchell said. "What poems would live and what would die. Today I'll read all new poems.” Many of her poems focused on nightmare childhood experiences, especially girls left on their own in scary physical as well as psychological spaces.

One poem takes place in an old amusement park, once glamorous but now boarded up except a few rundown hotels where after hours, decades after the glamour faded, "Marked kids got shared."

One of her last poems proclaims, "Poetry is absurd, like building a birdcage with birds."

There was also a startling omission to the wel-tailored and manicured academic crowd: "I like watching trashy TV . . . my favorite show is CSI."

Emcee C. K. Williams introduced the novelist Russell Banks as a novelist “concerned about history, as well as the ordinary and the unordinary.” Banks, who is preoccupied primarily with failed father/son relationships, is also a novelist of the working man, how history affects them and how they can redeem themselves or not.

Banks read from his short story collection The Angel on The Roof . His selection from The Child Screams and Looks Back At You horrified most, and particularly the parents in the audience. "When your child shows the first signs of illness -- fever, lassitude, aching joints and muscles -- you fear that he is dying," the story begins. "You may not admit it to anyone, but the sight of your child lying flushed and feverish in bed becomes for an instant the sight of your child in his coffin." A single mother calls the neighborhood doctor when her son comes down with a high fever, only to have the doctor make a pass at her, leading to a fateful, fatal decision.

Talking to the audience before reading, Banks admitted, "It's a little intimidating to be here with so many of my fellow authors in the audience." He said the sources of the stories came from anecdotes and stories overheard in bars, and his interest in the history of short stories -- images out of allegory, fable and the personal essay. This story about the death of the child and its effect on the mother is a result of this research.

As novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz left the reading with hundreds of other stunned listeners, she had one word to say to a woman sitting next to her: "Brutal."