2012 Common Threads poets Gail Mazur and Joyce Peseroff read from their new collections, Forbidden City and Know Thyself. Forbidden City, Gail Mazur's seventh book of poems, builds a meditative structure upon the elements of mortality and art. At the collection’s heart is the poet’s long marriage to the artist Michael Mazur (1935–2009). The Judges' Citation for the 2001 National Book Award praises Mazur as “Colloquial as well as eloquent, pitch-perfect no matter how delicate her material…Full of warmth, humor, and a dry-eyed toughness, her work is a superb personal and civic achievement.” Know Thyself, Peseroff's fifth book of poems, teases the nature of self-knowledge from a world where identity is fluid, character fragmented, landscape overwhelmed, and culture riven. As Donald Hall writes, "She brings up together with down, as the human psyche does--and as poetry must do to be true and beautiful together."