surreal

Donald Hall reads from The Alligator Bride: Poems New and Selected (1969) and The Yellow Room (1971). He also reads poems that would be collected in The Town of Hill (1975) along with several that remain uncollected, including a series of surrealistic limericks.

James Tate reads from his first collection, The Lost Pilot (1967), along with poems that would be collected in The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970).

James Tate returns to read for the Poetry Center for the first time since 1968, performing poems from several books.

In this reading, originally given with Jim Simmerman, Karen Brennan reads poetry and prose from The Real Enough World (2005) and The Garden in Which I Walk (2004), as well as several unpublished poems.

Roberto Tejada reads poems from Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022), which he describes as inhabiting the "actual and surreal" US-Mexico Borderlands. He also reads from a manuscript in progress begun during the Coronavirus pandemic titled Carbonate of Copper, informed by a widening and blurring sense of the self, the human, and the non-human.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera begins with English and Spanish readings from Akrílica (2022), trading languages with translator Farid Matuk. Together, they also read Herrera’s poem "i am not a paid protestor," which Herrera terms a "duo poem" for two voices in dialogue with one another. Herrera closes out the reading with poems and remarks about mass shootings, classical music, space exploration, and human suffering and connection.

Summer resident Angel Dominguez reads poems rooted in ancestors and community as they protest colonialism, fascism, and gentrification. Dominguez first reads from across their published works: Black Lavender Milk (2015), RoseSunWater (2021), and Desgraciado (the collected letters) (2022). They close the reading with recent poems, including one written the night before the reading and others from a manuscript in progress titled Don't Tell My Mother If They Kill Me.