Despite being the moderator, I was probably the most excited attendee at this special event! Carmine Street Metrics, with hosts Anton Yakovlev and Wendy Sloan, held an online reading from Outer Space: 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The reading featured 12 of the contributors from across the globe! I had not met or spoken to many of them before, only communicated by email, and it was such a treat to hear these poems in the poets’ own voices, after seeing them on the page for so long!
The readers included Victoria Moul, Alice Gorman, A.M. Juster, Jay Ruzesky, John Curl, Janet Kenny, Leslie Monsour, John Foy, Donna Kane, Ned Balbo, Yun Wang, and Anton Yakovlev. In addition to their own poems, they read poems by A.E. Housman, Deborah Warren, Elizabeth Jennings, A.E. Stallings, Rebecca Elson, Catherine Chandler, and translations of Du Fu, Alexander Pushkin, and poems from Sanskrit, Mayan, Old English, and Passamaquoddy.
There are some amazing moments during the reading, including images of Valentina Tereshkova, a few lines in Mayan, and a reading of Du Fu in the original. Enjoy!