Lit City


	Book Review: City of Rivers by Zubair Ahmed by Woody Brown
	“Of the heart,” we might say of Zubair Ahmed’s poetry, but it is also decidedly of the body. A morbid mortality insists in each of the poems in City of Rivers, the second publication from Ahmed, a 24 year-old one-time professional video gamer who now studies mechanical engineering and creative writing at Stanford. His scientific knowledge at times clearly informs his examination of the human experience, but he is not afraid to speak of the Big Things using Big Thing words that straddle the border between cliché and profundity.
	A Comprehensive Poetry Anthology Remembers a Vibrant Era in Buffalo by Jan Jezioro
	One of the most influential poets of post World War II America, Charles Olson served as a visiting faculty member of the University at Buffalo from 1963 to 1965, after serving first as a visiting professor, then later as rector, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1951 to 1956, when the college closed. Olson, who worked with musician John Cage and poet Robert Creeley, influenced a generation of American poets, so it is fitting that the lines from his poem ‘Buffalo Ode’ were selected by Max Wickert, retired professor of English at UB and the editor of An Outriders Anthology: Poetry in Buffalo 1969-1979 and After, as the epigraph to the new collection published by the Buffalo-based Outriders Poetry Project.

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