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Gretel Ehrlich discusses the process of collaboration on a series of poems composed for a ballet. She reads poems from this series, including "Resolute Passage"; she also reads excerpts from "The Fasting Heart," an essay collected in Islands, The Universe, Home (1991).

William Olsen reads primarily poems that would go on to be collected in Trouble Lights (2002), including "A Cat," "The Human Heart," "To A Fly," "Ruin Outlasting Sorrow," and "Black Globe."

This reading was originally scheduled as a joint appearance by Brazilian poet Adélia Prado and her translator Ellen Doré Watson, but Prado was unable to travel due to health issues. Watson thus reads her translations of Prado's poetry, as collected in The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems (1990), and plays recordings of Prado reading some of her poetry in the original Portuguese.