In person: Daffodil and other poems with Vincent Katz

Join Milkweed Books and Rain Taxi on the evening of June 12 as we welcoming visiting poet Vincent Katz to read from his new collection, Daffodil and other poems. Vincent will be joined in conversation with poet Dobby Gibson.

ABOUT THE COLLECTION

With his painterly eye and disarming concision on the page, Katz opens this book with a powerful image of “all time sequestered in the fold of a daffodil,” setting the stage for an encounter with the immediacy we must embrace to see the world around us with clarity. At the center of this collection are his captivating poems about animals—“The hope in fear / In thrill to run” of the rabbit, the snapping turtle “nestled // Next to brother rock”—as the poems continually engage with the heady passage of days and years, and the promise to honor a life in the here and now, to walk the street with the sense that, “It’s not about buying / But rather about feeling the air.”

“Whether in nature, or on a crowded or empty city street, was all a dream?” Katz writes, considering Daffodil. “Surely, there was and is still someone close, and that continues, as animals, despite war, despite incursions, continue. New York is a place of return, where we’re aware of faces and other things; there, or in a field of flowers, in places in the distant past and present, love has some inexorable way of continuing.”

These poems evoke the exact scenes that command our daily thoughts, that usher in grace and beauty, with their quietly urgent moral qualities, which, Katz suggests, can shape our days if we allow them to.

ABOUT THE POETS

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and critic. He is the author of the poetry collection Daffodil, out this year from Alfred A. Knopf, as well as the collections Broadway for Paul, Southness, and Swimming Home, among others.

He collaborated with Anne Waldman on the book-length poem Fantastic Caryatids and with Andrei Codrescu on A Possible Epic of Care. Katz is the author of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, translations of the Roman love poet, and is currently translating the Works and Days and the Theogony of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod.

He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He lives in New York City.

Dobby Gibson is the author of Polar (Alice James Books), which won the Alice James Award; Skirmish (Graywolf Press); It Becomes You (Graywolf Press), which was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award; Little Glass Planet (Graywolf Press); and Hold Everything (Graywolf Press).

Gibson’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications, as well as anthologized in books including Good Poems American Places (Penguin Books). He’s been a visitor to colleges and universities including Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, New York University, UMass-Amherst, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Born in Minneapolis, Gibson earned his BA in English Literature from Connecticut College, and an MFA in creative writing (fiction) from Indiana University.

The recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board, Gibson is a past board member of The Loft Literary Center.