Alyssa Moore’s WET MEDIA Book Launch (w/ Tilted House)

Come celebrate Alyssa Moore’s debut chapbook WET MEDIA, recipient of Tilted House’s 2023 1BR / 3BATH Chapbook Prize. They will be joined by last year's 1BR recipient, Danny Unger from New Orleans, and 2023 Netsuke Series recipient, Isaac George Lauritsen from Chicago. WET MEDIA is a humorous, visual explosion of polemics on paywalls, clocks, la la land, and other mechanisms of control. Through its (anti)forms, it jams its slippery text into the cogs of the apparatus, and waits. Hosted by Tilted House editor, Cameron Lovejoy.

Chax Press at 40

Chax Press founder/director Charles Alexander and other friends and Chax authors will present a history of Chax Press 1984-2024, a look toward the future, and brief comments. Some participants may read from their own Chax books.

Poetry and the After-Life

Poems embody many types of existence that transcend the particulars of their initial time and space continuum.  For instance, poetry readers revivify a poem upon each reading; a poem reanimates experience, feeling, or an idea over and over; translators give a poem an afterlife or second life in another language. And most of all, poetry embraces the unknown by exploring different manifestations of pre-life (genetics) and post-life (ghosts and other spiritual manifestations).

Poems to Navigate Home

At this reading, a collective of poets from the Coastal South will share their work concerning what it means to be a poet at home, a poet searching for home, or a poet returning home in 2024, when home is subject to rampant environmental and social injustices and their consequential economic, political, health, and climate crises. 

POLYPHONIC SWAMP SONICS

Polyphonic Swamp Sonics is a performance organized by four University of New Orleans MFA students. We will use the interplay of spoken word and recorded sounds such as water crashing against the lakefront and the sound of cars rushing by on the overpass to mirror the Anthropocene. Through vocal and audio manipulation, we will degrade these sounds into their simplest syllabic noise.

Inside You There Is Another You: A Reading from Kim Hyesoon’s A Drink of Red Mirror

The poem “Bat” begins innocuously, “Because our beds are on different continents / when I go to sleep you wake up / and when I wake up you go to sleep”—and continues, “Have you received the pair of hands I sent you yesterday?” Such are the turns present everywhere in the poetry of Kim Hyesoon, a prominent South Korean poet known for her vivid and surreal imagery of the feminine. The collection A Drink of Red Mirror, originally published in 2004, was translated by a team and published in English in 2019. Entering the collection is to enter the landscape of the poet's body and mind w

Roof Books Group Reading

Roof Books has introduced poets from every new poetic tendency for nearly 50 years. Roof editor, James Sherry will introduce this year's poets. Our reading at New Orleans Poetry Festival includes: Norman Fischer, Tonya Foster, E. J. McAdams, Biljana Obradović, & Tyrone Williams.  

A ~~mercury firs~~ Reading

mercury firs is a new online journal of poetry, text, and whatevfir else— with a special interest in translation, hybrid texts, & 'ecologically-minded' work. Founded in 2022 and published biannually, mercury firs aims to grow fungalesque connections among a network of innovative poets and artists across geographic, aesthetic, linguistic, and generational spans. This reading, hosted by founding editor and New Orleans-based poet, Ian U Lockaby, will bring together contributors from the first four issues of the journal.

Diaspora and American Lyric: Four Poets on Family and Place

Four poets, Isabel Duarte-Gray, Jess Yuan, Tawanda Mulalu, and Darius Atefat-Peckham, will read from recently published collections. These writers reflect diverse perspectives on the poetics of place and identity, drawing upon personal and family history to interrogate conceptions of diaspora. Isabel-Duarte Gray will read from Even Shorn (Sarabande 2021), sharing poems on family history, folklore, and local orature in rural Kentucky, where she was raised.
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