One Circus Poem for now, more on Friday

Chapel Hill poet Alex Grant reads from his new collection, "The Circus Poems" (Lorimer Press, $16.95), 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 15, at Joseph Beth Books in SouthPark Mall.

Grant won the 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award for best collection by an N.C. poet and the 2006 Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. And yes, his new collection does mostly revolve around circus themes. Here's one:

The Dwarf

A full-grown man looking up at the world -- riding the trains

with the children -- they think him a child, ask why his beard

doesn't move when they tug it -- offer pink and white bunches

of stale cotton-candy. In his trailer at night, he looks up at the moon and imagines his body, enormous and celestial, lighting

half of the night sky -- casting its immense glow on the world.