Newspapers aren't prone to hyperbole. That's why you'll seldom see words like "exciting," "stunning," "moving" or "eye-opening" in our reports. But not this time.

Two literary programs last week, both at the New Hazlett Theater, North Side, rose above the high standards of the region's literary landscape in both material and execution, in my view, and I've attended more than my share of those kinds of events.

My reports from the field:

Jazz Poetry Concert, City of Asylum/Pittsburgh

Threats of storms sent this annual outdoor concert under the Hazlett roof Saturday night. The result was a tighter focus on the poetry and a more intimate relationship with the music in the crowded auditorium.

The stars were many. Jazz sax player Oliver Lake composed pieces for his quintet and the Flux Quartet, in from San Francisco, as well as music to accompany the nine poets.

Two of them -- Lynn Emanuel and Nickola Madzirov -- said later Lake's music brought a new urgency and sense of rhythm to their works.

Emanuel, co-director of the University of Pittsburgh's creative writing program, told me, "The music just drew me closer to the words. It was, 'Wow!' "

"I've never read my poems that way before," Madzirov said. "It was a totally new thing for me."

He's a poet from Macedonia, one of three visiting writers brought here by the U.S. Department of State.

The readers sent Lake recordings of their work to aid his compositions. "He was able to pick up on our rhythms and cadences," said Emanuel, "to write pieces that just seemed to fit our words."

With the theme, "What Is Home?" provided by sculptor Diane Samuels (she and husband Henry Reese are co-founders of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh), the poets and Lake created a kind of world tour, with a focus on Pittsburgh.

Carnegie Mellon professor Terrance Hayes was emcee of the poets (Barbara Russell handled the overall duties), contributing several of his own poems and delivering a powerful reading of a Seneca account of the land at the Point.

Poet Yona Harvey stepped in to perform a sharp version of Haniel Long's "Pittsburgh Memoranda," written in the 1920s.

Other readers were Pittsburgh-area residents Cvetka Lipus, Roman Antopolsky and Patricia Jabbeth Wesley. Maryam Ala Amjadi (Iran) and Rogelio Saunders (Cuba) attended under the State Department aegis that brings international writers to the University of Iowa to lecture.

Horacio Castellanos Moya, the exiled El Salvadoran novelist in residence here under the City of Asylum banner, opened the evening with a reading from two of his novels.

The one Pittsburgh native on the stage was the city's -- and nation's -- most honored poet, Gerald Stern.

Still rakish at 83, he ended the evening with four powerful poems -- "Lucky Life," "Aberdeen Proving Grounds 1945," "Roses" and "The Supreme Subject (Pittsburgh, 1967)."

It was the fitting end to a great evening. To those who attended, I'm sure they feel like Stern, fortunate to be there:

"Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life."

American Shorts: An Incident of Human Rights

The subject was the violent history of Central America through the practiced eyes of a novelist and a journalist Thursday before a half-filled Hazlett.

It was Moya again and his longtime friend, American writer Francisco Goldman, who delivered scathing and horrific accounts of government-sanctioned murder in Guatemala over the past three decades.

Reading in English and Spanish from his latest novel, "Senselessness," Moya demonstrated his broad humor as well as an air of resignation created from the genocide of Guatemala's indigenous population by the military dictatorship.

Goldman, whose mother is Guatemalan, discussed his new nonfiction work, "The Art of Political Murder," reporting on the assassination of Guatemalan Roman Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998 and the subsequent trial of those involved.

Known primarily for his novels, Goldman called his investigation an "eight-year journey of discovery." Working with the defense team, he faced threats of his own until the defendants were convicted, "the first ever conviction of anybody in the Guatemalan military."

Answering questions following their readings, the authors who have written both journalism and fiction compared the two.

Goldman said his nonfiction book, with its demands on following the facts, "was harder to write than fiction. Fiction doesn't require concrete resolutions."

Moya said he preferred telling his story in a novel because "the story was just too heavy for nonfiction."

Wrapping it up, the two programs filled the city with an international flavor as well as an appreciation of the 250-year-old town.