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Join us for an evening with award-winning poet Erika Meitner as she reads from her seventh collection, Assembled Audience, which explores what it means to be human in an increasingly precarious world.In these poems, people come together—over meals, at the beach, in protest and prayer and celebration, through vital acts of witness and collective mourning. Amid instability and peril, embodied gathering is not only a survival mechanism, but a form of resistance. Provocative and engaging, our speaker is a peripatetic philosopher, at once a Cassandra and a Pied Piper who brings us into the urgencies of the present moment: climate change, the pandemic and its aftermath, gun violence, xenophobia, fracking, eroding reproductive rights, and the moralized pressure to “stay present” amid disorder and danger. Over and over, we return to the hard work of existing in the Anthropocene—despite
all of our knowledge, everything is perilous, and safety is an illusion.
Brutally honest and lyrically dexterous, fusing Whitman’s generous
expansiveness with Erika Meitner’s signature virtuosic electricity and wit, Assembled Audience reminds us that forced optimism and bland platitudes won’t save us—but luck and wonder might.
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401 South Main Street, Suite 106, Blacksburg, VA, United States, Virginia 24060
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