Poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil shares work Wednesday evening

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More than 125 people came to see professor and poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil share her work at 8 p.m. Wednesday in the Charles V. Park Library Baber room.

Author of three collections: “Miracle Fruit,” “Lucky Fish” and “At the Drive-In Volcano,” as well as chapbook “Fishbone,” Nezhukumatathil is also an associate professor of English, teaching creative writing and environmental literature at the State University of New York.

Robert Fanning, assistant professor of English language and literature, began the evening by introducing Nezhukumatathil, a Chicago native, as one of the nation’s treasured poets.

“Every once in awhile, you come across a film, a book, a song, a painting, or in this case, a poem, that raises your gooseflesh, quickens your blood, thrills you back into the blazing day,” Fanning said.

Nezhukumatathil’s poem, “The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer,” had that effect on him, Fanning said.

“What I had found in Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s work was a whole new buffet of hues and spices and flavors that tinges all of her pages — a poetry seasoned with lush and learned stuff, with culture and history, with our whole globe,” Fanning said. “With all its secrets of soil, its apes and parrots, its peacocks and wolves, its curiosities and facts.”

Throughout the reading, Nezhukumatathil shared with the audience some of the events that inspired her work, which were met with laughter.

Nezhukumatathil talked about a poem she wrote comprised of emails from a school that had read one of her collections, as well as Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” The students had been given Nezhukumatathil’s email, which they responded to with critiques of her work, often comparing it to Whitman’s work.

Nezhukumatathil, a chemistry major until her junior year at Ohio State University, first became inspired after finding a poem in her honors residence hall.

“When someone name-dropped a poet, I would immerse myself in the stacks,” she said.

Travel is a main theme in Nezhukumatathil’s work. Although she said she does not write while she travels, she keeps image journals instead.

Nezhukumatathil said she was pleased with the sharp questions asked by the audience after the reading.

“Miracle Fruit” was a required reading in assistant professor of English language and literature Jeffrey Bean’s ENG 492: Advanced Poetry, class.

Bean was blown away by the reading and noticed some of his students were bursting with creativity after attending.

“I thought it was delightful,” Bean said. “This was my favorite reading at Central Michigan University.”