Great news, Israel Horovitz has two readings this summer in Massachusetts for his poetry collection, HEAVEN AND OTHER POEMS

Veteran playwright, screenwriter and film director Israel Horovitz celebrates his first-ever poetry collection, HEAVEN AND OTHER POEMS (Three Rooms Press) with a reading at Sawyer Free Library on Thursday, August 6 at 7pm and at Lucius Beebe Memorial Library on Monday, August 17 at 7pm.

“An Evening with Israel Horovitz” will feature the renowned author reading poems from the book and sharing stories about what inspired them. Horovitz has written poetry his entire life, and the work in HEAVEN relays deeply moving, often humorous, personal tales such as a conversation with Samuel Beckett, familial love and loss, and creative triumphs.

New York Times bestselling author Russell Banks raves, “Israel Horovitz is now one of a bare handful of playwrights, along with Tennessee Williams, Beckett, and a couple of Elizabethans, who can write first-rate poetry in English. These poems are not merely good for a man who happens to be a world-class playwright; they’re poems that make our lives larger than they would be without them.”

And Oscar-winning actor Kevin Kline, who stars in Horovitz’ new film, offers high praise for HEAVEN: “The poetry in this collection is variously political, personal, passionate, funny, nostalgic, elegiac, verbally playful, and unsparingly honest. Wordsworth said of the sonnet: ‘with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.’ The same can be said of the poems of Israel Horovitz.”

Copies of HEAVEN AND OTHER POEMS will be available for purchase and signing at both events.

Praise for HEAVEN AND OTHER POEMS:

“In this collection Horovitz gives a powerful bone to marrow account of his life as a man and world class artist. He encompasses so much: the brooding poet, a walker in the city, another member of another lost generation in Paris, the wanderlust of a wandering Jew, the older lover, and the man in his 70s with the specter of death over his shoulder.” —Doug Holder, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

“Horovitz is truly a renaissance man, so it makes perfect sense that he’s as adept with verse as he is with stage direction and dialogue.” —Book Trib

“Horovitz writes accessible, earthy, and mainly short poems that charm and beguile. . . “ —American Jewish World

“The poems . . . display erudition, bilingual fluency, celebrity cadre, and panache. Horovitz charms throughout this memoir-in-poetry.” —The Rumpus

“Serious autobiographical pieces . . ” —Publishers Weekly

“For 48 years I have known and enjoyed Israel’s plays, so it is no surprise that he is a really great poet at heart.” —Michael Douglas, (Oscar-winning actor/producer; Wall Street)

“Israel Horovitz is now one of a bare handful of playwrights, along with Tennessee Williams, Beckett, and a couple of Elizabethans, who can write first-rate poetry in English. These poems are not merely good for a man who happens to be a world-class playwright; they’re poems that make our lives larger than they would be without them.” —Russell Banks, (O. Henry Award-winning author, The Sweet Hereafter)

“Israel Horovitz loves language like most of us love oxygen. Words spill out of him and pile up in his work like beautiful mounds of rubble. never easy. never silly. Always tough, meaningful, funny, tragic and true. Heaven and Other Poems is a collective sigh, the work of a master writer and a hopeful man—perhaps the last among us to still believe in the redemptive powers of both love and art.” —Neil Labute (Award-winning playwright; The Shape of Things)

“Sometimes the best of writers express themselves beyond their identifiable disciplines, and now the renowned playwright, Isreal Horovitz, exhibits his remarkable way with words in his first book of poetry.” —Gay Talese (New York Times bestselling author; Honor Thy Father)

“The poetry in this collection is variously political, personal, passionate, funny, nostalgic, elegiac, verbally playful, and unsparingly honest. Wordsworth said of the sonnet: ‘with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.’ The same can be said of the poems of Israel Horovitz.” —Kevin Kline (Oscar-winning actor; A Fish Called Wanda)

ABOUT ISRAEL HOROVITZ
Playwright-screenwriter-director Israel Horovitz’s seventy stage-plays have been translated and performed in as many as thirty languages, worldwide. His plays have introduced such actors as Al Pacino, John Cazale, Jill Clayburgh, Marsha Mason, Gerard Depardieu, and many others. Best-known plays include Line (now in its fortieth year, off-Broadway), The Indian Wants the Bronx, Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, My Old Lady, The Widow’s Blind Date, It’s Called the Sugar Plum, Rats, Morning, and The Primary English Class. Best-known films include Author! Author!, Sunshine (for which he won the European Academy Award–Best Screenplay), James Dean (which introduced James Franco), 3 Weeks After Paradise (which he wrote, directed and starred in), and My Old Lady, which he recently adapted for the screen, and directed, starring Kevin Kline, Maggie Smith, and Kristin Scott-Thomas. Horovitz’s memoires Un New-Yorkais a Paris were recently published in France, where he was decorated as Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and is the most-produced American playwright in French theater history. Heaven and Other Poems is the first collection of his poetry he has authorized for publication.