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friday

A typical Friday night: You’re in a restaurant (that is just a restaurant), eating a meal (that is simply a meal) and drinking wine (that is nothing more than wine)—a routine with your special someone that you will repeat next weekend and the next. If you’re starting to take those nights for granted, Maryland’s former poet laureate, Linda Pastan, will remind you each moment is anything but ordinary in her latest collection, Queen of a Rainy Country. She quietly grieves for the world while watching the seasons pass too quickly, making even a standard dinner date seem poignant: “The waiter is clearing the table/as if of the debris of years./But there is still a bed waiting with pillows…and we can sink into their whiteness/as though an endless stream of mornings/still waited to dawn ahead of us.” Have your verve for life revived when Pastan discusses and signs copies of her work at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. (202) 364-1919. (Kim Gooden)