The connection between Robert Redford and Kiki Petrosino can easily be misunderstood.

In her first anthology, Fort Red Border, she utilizes an imaginary Redford to serve as the caring, quintessential picture of American masculinity. The character highlights his curiosities for her “natural” image.

Petrosino, a native of Baltimore, will read from her first collection at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., at 7 p.m. today. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum’s poetry is fierce with a tender melancholy, guided by an impressive grasp of pop culture.

Along with Petrosino, another distinguished workshop alumnus, Jordan Stempleman, will read from his fourth anthology, titled Doubled Over, a collection of lyrical poems that have an unconventional twist.

“I was exploring how the lyric can be blurted out subconsciously,” said the writer and lecturer from his hometown of Kansas City, Mo.

Stempleman and Petrosino are doing something unconventional at Prairie Lights. Performing duets is by no means uncommon in music or theater, but the practice is still rare in poetry.

The two arranged the session years in advance when both were employed at the UI International Writing Program. They decided to have the reading coincide with the publication of their works.

“Look for something between the lines of the classic duets of Kenny Rodgers and Kim Carnes or Lita Ford and Ozzy Osbourne,” Stempleman wrote via e-mail.

Although both poets were unable to fully disclose how the show would go about, they promised that there would be no major theatrics involved.

“I think we’re just going to let the poems play out from one another,” Stempleman said. “We just had really similar ideas about poetry.”

He wanted to partner with Petrosino because of their shared poetic vision. Be that is it may, the poets’ books are strikingly different from another.

Petrosino’s anthology talks of yearning and unrealistic love, emotions that are evoked with images of pop culture and the idea of an unattainable man. That man just so happens to be Redford.

“He stands in for a quality of unattainability, a love that doesn’t exist in real life,” Petrosino said. “It’s like people want to be loved in a certain way that panders to their particular brand of loneliness.”

While Petrosino deals with love, Stempleman — a teacher at the Kansas City Art Institute — has found some relief with his new book. In Doubled Over, a collection of poems that are a hybrid of his daily encounters and imagination, there seemed to be a flow not found in his past work.

“It felt like all the other collections were leading up to … the new way I was going to write,” Stempleman said, citing the inconsistency of his past works. “I finally got it. This is a place from which I need to see and say things.”

Writers’ Workshop faculty member Cole Swensen said that while her former pupils’ writing styles are on different poles, she finds that both are very strong in their chosen medium.

“It’s always hard to put labels on such things, but Jordan’s work has a wonderful immediacy, a sort of timelessness of the total present,” Swensen said. “Kiki’s work manages a sense of history and a real elegance of sound.”