Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumnus Aaron McCollough will read from his latest book, Underlight at 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 8, in a free reading at Prairie Lights Books in downtown Iowa City. The reading also will be streamed live on the University of Iowa Writing University website.

McCollough serves as the assistant director for editorial activities at the University of Michigan Press. Previously he was the librarian for English literature and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. In addition to Underlight, his books include No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, Little Ease, Double Venus, and Welkin, winner of the first Sawtooth Poetry Prize. He has a doctorate in English literature from the University of Michigan and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Of Underlight, poet Peter Richards says, “Aaron McCollough’s poetry is a living system that is one part the assaulted world and one part the world’s conscious surveyor. In Underlight, ‘a private sorrow drapes’ revealing an ecology of disappointment where the poet reports ‘hearing at least feels like holding and where else does it go.’ While the music here plumbs various shapes a final hour can take, it also insists we should never agree to an end without first having our most heartfelt say, ‘Making love, we used the dark for leverage.’ Underlight is full of such impossible machines all doing emergency work.”

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is a graduate program in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

For more information or special accommodations to attend this reading, call Jan Weissmiller at Prairie Lights, 319-337-2681. For a UI arts calendar and details about upcoming events visit the new Arts Iowa website.