Reading

Presented in partnership with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) through the KL Wave International Exchange Grant, please come experience the poetry of two contemporary Korean poets in this bilingual reading: Lee Jenny, who has pushed Korean poetry to new horizons by shaping waves of language into poetic, auditory rhythms that go beyond meaning; and Yoo Heekyung who is well known for revealing the strangeness of the world through the unfamiliar feelings and sensations found in our daily lives.

Multi-media readings by experimental poets working with and against digital video. 

With short form video content & live-streaming taking their places as the most consumed formats above all other media today, what shapes do poems take?

What is poetic form amidst post-literacy? Aliens, weapons of mass destruction, ear licking, recipes crafted by dosed detectives, 9/11, let's plays, the NBA, and auto-erotic exhibitionist tendencies have something to do with it.

Is visuality the new orality? Or something. 

The APARTMENT Poetry high-rise has been steadily climbing since 2013. To celebrate, we present a reading, hosted by APARTMENT editor Michael Joseph Walsh, featuring some of APARTMENT's most illustrious and multitude-containing tenants: Jace Brittain, Stella Corso, Paul Cunningham, Jane Lewty, Aditi Machado, Danielle Pafunda, Michael Martin Shea, Danika Stegeman, and Elise Thi Tran. APARTMENT thanks you in advance for your attendance. As we're always saying: If you lived here, you'd be home by now.

It is particularly important in the current economic context—the broad defunding of arts, the hardships that are the byproduct of devalued artistic endeavors, among other pressures—to consider how the poem is both a vessel and a product of capitalism, and how poetry can explicitly push back against the broad economic system that dehumanizes and, as Adrienne Rich put it, “eviscerate[s] language of meaning.” Five poets will read from work that engages with questions of capital and undertakes the work of rehumanizing and reclaiming meaning.  

The náhuatl phrase for red and black ink signifies the power and permanence of the written word, of poetry. In this video, made expressly for this year’s NOPF by Cannonball Statman, four poets from the state of Oaxaca, read their poems written in Spanish, Zapotec, and English The work reflects on transcendence and language, the influence of landscape, and of immanence and cultural border crossing. The video will be introduced by poet Rodger Kamenetz who will then follow the video leading a short Q and A.

Queer poets connected to the South and to the Midwest prairie host a roundtable reading of their ecopoetic work, drawing on the storied history of queer and trans naturalist poets. From asexual and transgender plant species, to cruising spots, from the way fire opens seedpods to the way desire opens us to landscape—these poets trace how queerness and the land teach each other. What blooms in the margins? What thrives through transformation? How do our bodies learn from prairie persistence, from wetland regeneration, from species that refuse singular forms?

mercury firs publishes poetry, translation, and whatevfir else... Founded in 2022, with an online journal published semiannually and chapbooks sporadically, mercury firs foregrounds exploratory work to expand the thinkable… inside the outside…. 

Common Place Poetics is delighted to propose a reading featuring poets who have contributed to our intimate journal. Common Place is a seasonal publication of poetry and poetics, co-edited by Samira Abed, Scout Turkel, and Hannah Piette. Founded in 2024, we have published five “seasons” of poetry and poetic prose: https://commonplacepoetics.com. This coming spring, we will celebrate two years of Common Place. Our journal asks, how is poetry a method for living, and how is living a method for poetry? We maintain that poetry turns both toward and against everyday life for its materials.

Second Factory, now in its seventh issue, is the annual journal of Ugly Duckling Presse. 2F publishes poetry, visual art, and translation by artists and writers worldwide. The work we are drawn to reflects UDP's love of the mangy, the feral, the subcutaneous, the full-bodied, the otherwise-unpublishable, and is selected by a rotating crowd of UDP editors, friends, apprentices, and other shadows—whoever happens to be on the floor when it comes time to put it together.

This reading will showcase poets and translators with work published by four NYC-based small presses: Beautiful Days Press, New Mundo Press, Topos Press, and Ursus Americanus Press.