Catherine Barnett is celebrated for her exploration of human fragility, loneliness, and connection. In her new collection Solutions for the Problems of Bodies in Space, Barnett probes the complexities of love, loss, and deliberate living.
Maureen McLane’s new book, My Poetics, explores poems as speculative instruments and as ways of registering our very sense of being alive.
Barnett and McLane will read and discuss loneliness as a source of artistic creation and the urgency of poetry in an increasingly isolating world.
Join us as we explore the problems of being human brought into new relief through the contours of poetry.
About the speakers:
Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf); Human Hours (New York Times “Best Poetry of 2018” selection); The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award). A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Nation, Harper’s, and elsewhere. She teaches in NYU’s MFA Program and works as an independent editor.
Maureen N. McLane is the author of eight books of poetry, two critical monographs on British romantic poetics, an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism (My Poets), and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her most recent books are What You Want: poems (2023) and My Poetics (2024), an adventure in poeticriticism. She is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University.
